  When developing policies for prevention of infectious diseases, policymakers
often set specific, outcome-oriented targets to achieve. For example, when
developing a vaccine allocation policy, policymakers may want to distribute
them so that at least a certain fraction of individuals in a census block are
disease-free and spillover effects due to interference within blocks are
accounted for. The paper proposes methods to estimate a block-level treatment
policy that achieves a pre-defined, outcome-oriented target while accounting
for spillover effects due to interference. Our policy, the minimum resource
threshold policy (MRTP), suggests the minimum fraction of treated units
required within a block to meet or exceed the target level of the outcome. We
estimate the MRTP from empirical risk minimization using a novel,
nonparametric, doubly robust loss function. We then characterize statistical
properties of the estimated MRTP in terms of the excess risk bound. We apply
our methodology to design a water, sanitation, and hygiene allocation policy
for Senegal with the goal of increasing the proportion of households with no
children experiencing diarrhea to a level exceeding a specified threshold. Our
policy outperforms competing policies and offers new approaches to design
allocation policies, especially in international development for communicable
diseases.
