Related papers: When Does Interference Matter? Decision-Making in …
The assumption that no subject's exposure affects another subject's outcome, known as the no-interference assumption, has long held a foundational position in the study of causal inference. However, this assumption may be violated in many…
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…
Exposure mappings are widely used to model potential outcomes in the presence of interference, where each unit's outcome may depend not only on its own treatment, but also on the treatment of other units as well. However, in practice these…
Optimizing recommender systems based on user interaction data is mainly seen as a problem of dealing with selection bias, where most existing work assumes that interactions from different users are independent. However, it has been shown…
Randomized experiments have become a standard tool in economics. In analyzing randomized experiments, the traditional approach has been based on the Stable Unit Treatment Value (SUTVA: \cite{rubin}) assumption which dictates that there is…
Design of experiments and estimation of treatment effects in large-scale networks, in the presence of strong interference, is a challenging and important problem. Most existing methods' performance deteriorates as the density of the network…
Two-sided marketplaces are standard business models of many online platforms (e.g., Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn), wherein the platforms have consumers, buyers or content viewers on one side and producers, sellers or content-creators on the…
An experimental unit is an opportunity to randomly apply or withhold a treatment. There is interference between units if the application of the treatment to one unit may also affect other units. In cognitive neuroscience, a common form of…
Online experiments in ads, recommendation, and member-experience systems are often planned before the dominant interference mechanism is known. A treatment may propagate through budgets, inventory, producer exposure, graph spillovers, or…
We study A/B experiments that are designed to compare the performance of two recommendation algorithms. Prior work has observed that the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA) often does not hold in large-scale recommendation…
Randomized experiments, or A/B tests are used to estimate the causal impact of a feature on the behavior of users by creating two parallel universes in which members are simultaneously assigned to treatment and control. However, in social…
In data centers, tasks are dispatched to various servers to evenly distribute the workload. When a data center considers implementing a new scheduling algorithm, it typically conducts an A/B test prior to deployment to assess the real-world…
Randomized experiments, or A/B testing, are the gold standard for evaluating interventions, yet they remain underutilized in inventory management. This study addresses this gap by analyzing A/B testing strategies in multi-item, multi-period…
Online reviews are typically written by volunteers and, as a consequence, information about seller quality may be under-provided in digital marketplaces. We study the extent of this under-provision in a large-scale randomized experiment…
Bipartite experiments are a recent object of study in causal inference, whereby treatment is applied to one set of units and outcomes of interest are measured on a different set of units. These experiments are particularly useful in…
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…
Companies offering web services routinely run randomized online experiments to estimate the causal impact associated with the adoption of new features and policies on key performance metrics of interest. These experiments are used to…
Experimental research on behavior and cognition frequently rests on stimulus or subject selection where not all characteristics can be fully controlled, even when attempting strict matching. For example, when contrasting patients to…
Categorization is necessary for many decision making tasks. However, the categorization process may interfere the decision making result and the law of total probability can be violated in some situations. To predict the interference effect…
Many interventions, such as vaccines in clinical trials or coupons in online marketplaces, must be assigned sequentially without full knowledge of their effects. Multi-armed bandit algorithms have proven successful in such settings.…