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Online controlled experiments (A/B tests) have become the gold standard for learning the impact of new product features in technology companies. Randomization enables the inference of causality from an A/B test. The randomized assignment…

Applications · Statistics 2022-12-20 Qike Li , Samir Jamkhande , Pavel Kochetkov , Pai Liu

Online labor markets have great potential as platforms for conducting experiments, as they provide immediate access to a large and diverse subject pool and allow researchers to conduct randomized controlled trials. We argue that online…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-03-19 John J. Horton , David G. Rand , Richard J. Zeckhauser

As technology continues to advance, there is increasing concern about individuals being left behind. Many businesses are striving to adopt responsible design practices and avoid any unintended consequences of their products and services,…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Guillaume Saint-Jacques , Amir Sepehri , Nicole Li , Igor Perisic

A/B testing methodology is generally performed by private companies to increase user engagement and satisfaction about online features. Their usage is far from being transparent and may undermine user autonomy (e.g. polarizing individual…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Matteo Ottaviani , Stefan M. Herzog , Pietro Leonardo Nickl , Philipp Lorenz-Spreen

When developing a new networking algorithm, it is established practice to run a randomized experiment, or A/B test, to evaluate its performance. In an A/B test, traffic is randomly allocated between a treatment group, which uses the new…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2021-10-04 Bruce Spang , Veronica Hannan , Shravya Kunamalla , Te-Yuan Huang , Nick McKeown , Ramesh Johari

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-03-27 Kevin Han , Shuangning Li , Jialiang Mao , Han Wu

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

Evaluation plays a crucial role in the development of ranking algorithms on search and recommender systems. It enables online platforms to create user-friendly features that drive commercial success in a steady and effective manner. The…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Qing Zhang , Alex Deng , Michelle Du , Huiji Gao , Liwei He , Sanjeev Katariya

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-22 Ramesh Johari , Orrie B. Page , Gabriel Y. Weintraub

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-28 Ramesh Johari , Hannah Li , Inessa Liskovich , Gabriel Weintraub

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-04-27 Hannah Li , Geng Zhao , Ramesh Johari , Gabriel Y. Weintraub

User-randomized A/B testing has emerged as the gold standard for online experimentation. However, when this kind of approach is not feasible due to legal, ethical or practical considerations, experimenters have to consider alternatives like…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-17 Paul Missault , Lorenzo Masoero , Christian Delbé , Thomas Richardson , Guido Imbens

On-line experimentation (also known as A/B testing) has become an integral part of software development. To timely incorporate user feedback and continuously improve products, many software companies have adopted the culture of agile…

Applications · Statistics 2019-08-13 Yu Wang , Somit Gupta , Jiannan Lu , Ali Mahmoudzadeh , Sophia Liu

Evaluating the causal effect of recommendations is an important objective because the causal effect on user interactions can directly leads to an increase in sales and user engagement. To select an optimal recommendation model, it is common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Masahiro Sato

Online controlled experiments, colloquially known as A/B-tests, are the bread and butter of real-world recommender system evaluation. Typically, end-users are randomly assigned some system variant, and a plethora of metrics are then…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Olivier Jeunen , Shubham Baweja , Neeti Pokharna , Aleksei Ustimenko

The widespread adoption of online randomized controlled experiments (A/B Tests) for decision-making has created ongoing capacity constraints which necessitate interim analyses. As a consequence, platform users are increasingly motivated to…

Applications · Statistics 2025-11-11 Abbas Zaidi , Rina Friedberg , Samir Khan , Yao-Yang Leow , Maulik Soneji , Houssam Nassif , Richard Mudd

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

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…

Applications · Statistics 2024-02-23 Lars Roemheld , Justin Rao

It is increasingly common in digital environments to use A/B tests to compare the performance of recommendation algorithms. However, such experiments often violate the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA), particularly SUTVA's "no…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-16 Zahra Fatemi , Elena Zheleva