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Online user-generated content platforms allocate billions of dollars of promotional traffic through algorithms in two-sided marketplaces. To evaluate updates to these algorithms, platforms frequently rely on creator-side randomized…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-03-10 Ruohan Zhan , Shichao Han , Yuchen Hu , Zhenling Jiang

Online controlled experiments, or A/B tests, are large-scale randomized trials in digital environments. This paper investigates the estimands of the difference-in-means estimator in these experiments, focusing on scenarios with repeated…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-12 Sebastian Ankargren , Mattias Frånberg , Mårten Schultzberg

Incrementality experiments compare customers exposed to a marketing action designed to increase sales to those randomly assigned to a control group. These experiments suffer from noisy responses which make precise estimation of the average…

Applications · Statistics 2023-05-11 Ron Berman , Elea McDonnell Feit

Assume that one is interested in estimating an average treatment effect (ATE), equal to a weighted average of $S$ conditional average treatment effects (CATEs). One has unbiased estimators of the CATEs. One could just average the CATE…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-11-11 Clément de Chaisemartin

Participants in online experiments often enroll over time, which can compromise sample representativeness due to temporal shifts in covariates. This issue is particularly critical in A/B tests, online controlled experiments extensively used…

General Economics · Economics 2026-03-30 Chen Wang , Shichao Han , Shan Huang

We consider the problem of designing a randomized experiment on a source population to estimate the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) on a target population. We propose a novel approach which explicitly considers the target when designing the…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-07 My Phan , David Arbour , Drew Dimmery , Anup B. Rao

Online controlled experiments are the primary tool for measuring the causal impact of product changes in digital businesses. It is increasingly common for digital products and services to interact with customers in a personalised way. Using…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-07-02 C. H. Bryan Liu , Benjamin Paul Chamberlain

Individualized randomized experiments are central to online platforms for optimizing personalized decisions in complex environments. In two-sided markets, however, standard treatment effect estimation is often invalid due to strong temporal…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-27 Shuguang Yu , Ting Li , Yuchen Lu , Chengchun Shi , Fan Zhou , Zhichao Zou , Peng Zhen , Hongtu Zhu

Experiments on online marketplaces and social networks suffer from interference, where the outcome of a unit is impacted by the treatment status of other units. We propose a framework for modeling interference using a ubiquitous deployment…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-21 Ariel Boyarsky , Hongseok Namkoong , Jean Pouget-Abadie

A/B testing has become the cornerstone of decision-making in online markets, guiding how platforms launch new features, optimize pricing strategies, and improve user experience. In practice, we typically employ the pairwise $t$-test to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-29 Junpeng Gong , Chunkai Wang , Hao Li , Jinyong Ma , Haoxuan Li , Xu He

Randomized experiments are widely used to estimate causal effects across a variety of domains. However, classical causal inference approaches rely on critical independence assumptions that are violated by network interference, when the…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-18 Mayleen Cortez , Matthew Eichhorn , Christina Lee Yu

The reliability of controlled experiments, commonly referred to as "A/B tests," is often compromised by network interference, where the outcomes of individual units are influenced by interactions with others. Significant challenges in this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-02 Yuan Yuan , Kristen M. Altenburger

We study experimentation under endogenous network interference. Interference patterns are mediated by an endogenous graph, where edges can be formed or eliminated as a result of treatment. We show that conventional estimators are biased in…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-21 Wenshuo Wang , Edvard Bakhitov , Dominic Coey

A central obstacle in the objective assessment of treatment effect (TE) estimators in randomized control trials (RCTs) is the lack of ground truth (or validation set) to test their performance. In this paper, we propose a novel…

We describe our framework, deployed at Facebook, that accounts for interference between experimental units through cluster-randomized experiments. We document this system, including the design and estimation procedures, and detail insights…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2020-12-17 Brian Karrer , Liang Shi , Monica Bhole , Matt Goldman , Tyrone Palmer , Charlie Gelman , Mikael Konutgan , Feng Sun

Experimentation in online digital platforms is used to inform decision making. Specifically, the goal of many experiments is to optimize a metric of interest. Null hypothesis statistical testing can be ill-suited to this task, as it is…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-12-10 Timothy Sudijono , Simon Ejdemyr , Apoorva Lal , Martin Tingley

Experiments in online platforms frequently suffer from network interference, in which a treatment applied to a given unit affects outcomes for other units connected via the platform. This SUTVA violation biases naive approaches to…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Tianyi Peng , Naimeng Ye , Andrew Zheng

We give an approach for characterizing interference by lower bounding the number of units whose outcome depends on selected groups of treated individuals, such as depending on the treatment of others, or others who are at least a certain…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-04 David Choi

A/B testing is the foundation of decision-making in online platforms, yet social products often suffer from network interference: user interactions cause treatment effects to spill over into the control group. Such spillovers bias causal…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Xu Min , Zhaoxu Yang , Kaixuan Tan , Juan Yan , Xunbin Xiong , Zihao Zhu , Kaiyu Zhu , Fenglin Cui , Yang Yang , Sihua Yang , Jianhui Bu

E-commerce companies have a number of online products, such as organic search, sponsored search, and recommendation modules, to fulfill customer needs. Although each of these products provides a unique opportunity for users to interact with…

Applications · Statistics 2020-06-23 Xuan Yin , Liangjie Hong