Bayesian Placebo Test

The Bayesian Placebo Test is a falsification strategy for causal inference that applies Bayesian inference to placebo scenarios — either fake treatments in the pre-intervention period, on unaffected units, or at fictitious cut-offs — to verify that observed treatment effects cannot plausibly arise by chance or from a misspecified model. It integrates prior information and yields posterior distributions of placebo effects for direct probabilistic comparison.