Related papers: Reducing Interference Bias in Online Marketplace P…
It is standard practice in online retail to run pricing experiments by randomizing at the article-level, i.e. by changing prices of different products to identify treatment effects. Due to customers' cross-price substitution behavior, such…
In an A/B test, the typical objective is to measure the total average treatment effect (TATE), which measures the difference between the average outcome if all users were treated and the average outcome if all users were untreated. However,…
Online experimentation, also known as A/B testing, is the gold standard for measuring product impacts and making business decisions in the tech industry. The validity and utility of experiments, however, hinge on unbiasedness and sufficient…
Interference between treated and untreated units is a source of bias in marketplace experiments. In this paper, we specifically consider pricing interventions, in which a platform seeks to adjust base pricing levels at the marketplace level…
Two-sided marketplace platforms often run experiments to test the effect of an intervention before launching it platform-wide. A typical approach is to randomize individuals into the treatment group, which receives the intervention, and the…
Variance reduction for causal inference in the presence of network interference is often achieved through either outcome modeling, typically analyzed under unit-randomized Bernoulli designs, or clustered experimental designs, typically…
This paper investigates decision-making in A/B experiments for online platforms and marketplaces. In such settings, due to constraints on inventory, A/B experiments typically lead to biased estimators because of *interference* between…
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…
Marketplace companies rely heavily on experimentation when making changes to the design or operation of their platforms. The workhorse of experimentation is the randomized controlled trial (RCT), or A/B test, in which users are randomly…
A/B testing, or controlled experiments, is the gold standard approach to causally compare the performance of algorithms on online platforms. However, conventional Bernoulli randomization in A/B testing faces many challenges such as…
In randomized experiments, the classic Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA) posits that the outcome for one experimental unit is unaffected by the treatment assignments of other units. However, this assumption is frequently…
Estimating the effects of interventions in networks is complicated when the units are interacting, such that the outcomes for one unit may depend on the treatment assignment and behavior of many or all other units (i.e., there is…
A/B tests serve the purpose of reliably identifying the effect of changes introduced in online services. It is common for online platforms to run a large number of simultaneous experiments by splitting incoming user traffic randomly in…
We develop an analytical framework to study experimental design in two-sided marketplaces. Many of these experiments exhibit interference, where an intervention applied to one market participant influences the behavior of another…
Current approaches to A/B testing in networks focus on limiting interference, the concern that treatment effects can "spill over" from treatment nodes to control nodes and lead to biased causal effect estimation. Prominent methods for…
Online A/B testing is widely used in the internet industry to inform decisions on new feature roll-outs. For online marketplaces (such as advertising markets), standard approaches to A/B testing may lead to biased results when buyers…
The conclusions of randomized controlled trials may be biased when the outcome of one unit depends on the treatment status of other units, a problem known as interference. In this work, we study interference in the setting of one-sided…
In the past decade, the technology industry has adopted online randomized controlled experiments (a.k.a. A/B testing) to guide product development and make business decisions. In practice, A/B tests are often implemented with increasing…
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…
In this paper, we examine the biases that arise when firms run A/B tests on continuous parameters to estimate global treatment effects on performance metrics of interest; we particularly focus on price experiments to measure the price…