Related papers: Causal Inference on Stopped Random Walks in Online…

Causally identifying the effect of digital advertising is challenging, because experimentation is expensive, and observational data lacks random variation. This paper identifies a pervasive source of naturally occurring, quasi-experimental…

In classical causal inference, inferring cause-effect relations from data relies on the assumption that units are independent and identically distributed. This assumption is violated in settings where units are related through a network of…

Online advertising has been the major monetization approach for Internet companies. Advertisers invest budgets to bid for real-time impressions to gain direct and indirect returns. Existing works have been concentrating on optimizing direct…

Real-time bidding (RTB) systems, which utilize auctions to allocate user impressions to competing advertisers, continue to enjoy success in digital advertising. Assessing the effectiveness of such advertising remains a challenge in research…

This paper studies the measurement of advertising effects on online platforms when parallel experimentation occurs, that is, when multiple advertisers experiment concurrently. It provides a framework that makes precise how parallel…

Many online experiments exhibit dependence between users and items. For example, in online advertising, observations that have a user or an ad in common are likely to be associated. Because of this, even in experiments involving millions of…

Online platforms regularly conduct randomized experiments to understand how changes to the platform causally affect various outcomes of interest. However, experimentation on online platforms has been criticized for having, among other…

Estimating the treatment effect within network structures is a key focus in online controlled experiments, particularly for social media platforms. We investigate a scenario where the unit-level outcome of interest comprises a series of…

Randomized experiments (A/B testings) have become the standard way for web-facing companies to guide innovation, evaluate new products, and prioritize ideas. There are times, however, when running an experiment is too complicated (e.g., we…

In this paper, we propose a stochastic model to describe how search service providers charge client companies based on users' queries for the keywords related to these companies' ads by using certain advertisement assignment strategies. We…

Evaluating the incremental return on ad spend (iROAS) of a prospective online marketing strategy (i.e., the ratio of the strategy's causal effect on some response metric of interest relative to its causal effect on the ad spend) has become…

We study inference on the long-term causal effect of a continual exposure to a novel intervention, which we term a long-term treatment, based on an experiment involving only short-term observations. Key examples include the long-term health…

Regulators and academics are increasingly interested in the causal effect that algorithmic actions of a digital platform have on consumption. We introduce a general causal inference problem we call the steerability of consumption that…

Optimizing the timing and frequency of ads is a central problem in digital advertising, with significant economic consequences. Existing scheduling policies rely on simple heuristics, such as uniform spacing and frequency caps, that…

We review and conceptualize recent advances in causal inference under network interference, drawing on a complex and diverse body of work that ranges from causal inference, statistical network analysis, economics, the health sciences, and…

There are many scenarios where short- and long-term causal effects of an intervention are different. For example, low-quality ads may increase short-term ad clicks but decrease the long-term revenue via reduced clicks. This work, therefore,…

Causal inference in observational studies is notoriously difficult, due to the fact that the experimenter is not in charge of the treatment assignment mechanism. Many potential con- founding factors (PCFs) exist in such a scenario, and if…

The causal effect of showing an ad to a potential customer versus not, commonly referred to as "incrementality", is the fundamental question of advertising effectiveness. In digital advertising three major puzzle pieces are central to…

Existing auto-bidding algorithms in digital advertising often treat the value of an ad opportunity as the revenue obtained when an ad is shown and/or clicked, and bid accordingly. This can lead to wasteful spending because the true value is…

Popular social media platforms TikTok, Facebook and Instagram allow third-parties to run targeted advertising campaigns on sensitive attributes in-platform. These ads are interactive by default, meaning users can comment or ``react'' (e.g.,…