Abstract
The unit selection problem aims to identify a set
of individuals who are most likely to exhibit a desired mode of behavior, which is defined in counterfactual terms. A typical example is that of selecting individuals who would respond one way if
encouraged and a different way if not encouraged.
Unlike previous works on this problem, which rely
on ad-hoc heuristics, we approach this problem formally, using counterfactual logic, to properly capture the nature of the desired behavior. This formalism enables us to derive an informative selection
criterion which integrates experimental and observational data. We demonstrate the superiority of
this criterion over A/B-test-based approaches