The Causal Impact of Credit Lines on Spending Distributions ...

Consumer credit services offered by e-commerce platforms provide customers with convenient loan access during shopping and have the potential to stimulate sales. To understand the causal impact of credit lines on spending, previous studies have employed causal estimators, based on direct regression...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Yijun, Leung, Cheuk Hang, Sun, Xiangqian, Wang, Chaoqun, Huang, Yiyan, Yan, Xing, Wu, Qi, Wang, Dongdong, Huang, Zhixiang
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: arXiv 2023
Subjects:
DML
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2312.10388
https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.10388
Description
Summary:Consumer credit services offered by e-commerce platforms provide customers with convenient loan access during shopping and have the potential to stimulate sales. To understand the causal impact of credit lines on spending, previous studies have employed causal estimators, based on direct regression (DR), inverse propensity weighting (IPW), and double machine learning (DML) to estimate the treatment effect. However, these estimators do not consider the notion that an individual's spending can be understood and represented as a distribution, which captures the range and pattern of amounts spent across different orders. By disregarding the outcome as a distribution, valuable insights embedded within the outcome distribution might be overlooked. This paper develops a distribution-valued estimator framework that extends existing real-valued DR-, IPW-, and DML-based estimators to distribution-valued estimators within Rubin's causal framework. We establish their consistency and apply them to a real dataset from a ...