  We study the problem of off-policy evaluation for slate bandits, for the
typical case in which the logging policy factorizes over the slots of the
slate. We slightly depart from the existing literature by taking Bayes risk as
the criterion by which to evaluate estimators, and we analyze the family of
'additive' estimators that includes the pseudoinverse (PI) estimator of
Swaminathan et al.\ (2017; arXiv:1605.04812). Using a control variate approach,
we identify a new estimator in this family that is guaranteed to have lower
risk than PI in the above class of problems. In particular, we show that the
risk improvement over PI grows linearly with the number of slots, and linearly
with the gap between the arithmetic and the harmonic mean of a set of
slot-level divergences between the logging and the target policy. In the
typical case of a uniform logging policy and a deterministic target policy,
each divergence corresponds to slot size, showing that maximal gains can be
obtained for slate problems with diverse numbers of actions per slot.
