A/B Testing of Auctions
Abstract
For many application areas A/B testing, which partitions users of a system into an A (control) and B (treatment) group to experiment between several application designs, enables Internet companies to optimize their services to the behavioral patterns of their users. Unfortunately, the A/B testing framework cannot be applied in a straightforward manner to applications like auctions where the users (a.k.a., bidders) submit bids before the partitioning into the A and B groups is made. This paper combines auction theoretic modeling with the A/B testing framework to develop methodology for A/B testing auctions. The accuracy of our method %, assuming the auction is directly comparable to ideal A/B testing where there is no interference between A and B. Our results are based on an extension and improved analysis of the inference method of Chawla et al. (2014).
Cite
@article{arxiv.1606.00908,
title = {A/B Testing of Auctions},
author = {Shuchi Chawla and Jason D. Hartline and Denis Nekipelov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.00908},
year = {2022}
}