Year: 2023
Type: conference-abstract
Abstract: Experimentation is the foundation of scientific decision-making on online marketplaces and social networks. However, experiments often suffer from interference where intervening on a participant impacts the outcome of other participants. Under general interference, the causal effect cannot be identified even in a randomized experiment. Interference is especially problematic in marketplaces, where strategic agents compete for scarce resources. For example, consider an experiment comparing two different policies for selecting the reserve price in a second-price advertising auction. Changes in the reserve price ("treatment / intervention") for some advertisers (bidders) can affect other advertisers through market competition, impacting the outcomes of even untreated advertisers.
Institutions: Columbia University, Google (United States)
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics and Probability
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4383558099