Waiting Buys Exactly Two Moments: Endogenous Identification in Prediction-Driven Allocation

Abstract

A planner with a fixed budget of preventive help must decide whom to help and when. Waiting reveals risk but removes intervention opportunities as higher-risk individuals leave first. We characterize this tradeoff under repeated noisy signals and risk-dependent attrition: in the canonical model, a length-$τ$ observation prefix identifies exactly the latent risk moments $m_j=\mathbb E[p^j]$ for $j=0,\ldots,2τ-1$, buying two new moments per additional period. These identify average next-period attrition among survivors but need not identify allocation welfare or attrition among those prioritized for treatment. Our observationally equivalent constructions establish unavoidable timing regret at any sample size for a fixed observation length, while exact certificates determine whether all compatible populations share a unique optimal date. Matched experiments separate the effects of estimation, bootstrap averaging, and regret weighting. Longer observation often resolves timing ambiguity, but the optimal date may already have passed. In our experiments, bootstrap averaging and early stopping improve decisions, while regret weighting adds no improvement in pooled mean squared regret: better statistical fit need not yield better allocation welfare. The code and artifacts are available at https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/waiting-buys-two-moments.