4.6 Potential outcomes framework (1)

  • Causality tied to action applied to unit at particular point in time (Imbens and Rubin 2015, 4)13
  • Unit exposed to treatment could have been exposed to control
  • Visualization: Decision tree (e.g. Imbens and Rubin 2015) or line graph on next slide (Bauer 2016)
flowchart tab1 Peter tab2 Control tab1->tab2 tab3 Treatment tab1->tab3 tab4 Outcome under control ($Y_i0$) tab2->tab4 tab5 Outcome under treatment ($Y_i1$) tab3->tab5

References

Bauer, Paul C. 2016. “The Visual Display of Causal Relationships.”

Imbens, Guido W, and Donald B Rubin. 2015. Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press.


  1. Imbens and Rubin (2015, 4) conceptualize the same individual at a different time as a different unit.