Identification and Inference on Treatment Effects under Covariate-Adaptive Randomization and Imperfect Compliance

Abstract: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) frequently utilize covariate-adaptive randomization (CAR) (e.g., stratified block randomization) and commonly suffer from imperfect compliance. This paper studies the identification and inference for the average treatment effect (ATE) and the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) in such RCTs with a binary treatment.

We first develop characterizations of the identified sets for both estimands. Since data are generally not i.i.d. under CAR, these characterizations do not follow from existing results. We then provide consistent estimators of the identified sets and asymptotically valid confidence intervals for the parameters. Our asymptotic analysis leads to concrete practical recommendations regarding how to estimate the treatment assignment probabilities that enter the estimated bounds. For the ATE bounds, using sample analog assignment frequencies is more efficient than relying on the true assignment probabilities. For the ATT bounds, the most efficient approach is to use the true assignment probability for the probabilities in the numerator and the sample analog for those in the denominator.