Exposure effects are not automatically useful for policymaking

Abstract

We thank Savje (2023) for a thought-provoking article and appreciate the opportunity to share our perspective as social scientists. In his article, Savje recommends misspecified exposure effects as a way to avoid strong assumptions about interference when analyzing the results of an experiment. In this invited discussion, we highlight a limiation of Savje's recommendation: exposure effects are not generally useful for evaluating social policies without the strong assumptions that Savje seeks to avoid.