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arXiv · 1606.00908

A/B Testing of Auctions

Shuchi Chawla·Jason D. Hartline·Denis Nekipelov
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Abstract

For many application areas A/B testing, which partitions users of a system into an A (control) and B (treatment) group to experiment between several application designs, enables Internet companies to optimize their services to the behavioral patterns of their users. Unfortunately, the A/B testing framework cannot be applied in a straightforward manner to applications like auctions where the users (a.k.a., bidders) submit bids before the partitioning into the A and B groups is made. This paper combines auction theoretic modeling with the A/B testing framework to develop methodology for A/B testing auctions. The accuracy of our method %, assuming the auction is directly comparable to ideal A/B testing where there is no interference between A and B. Our results are based on an extension and improved analysis of the inference method of Chawla et al. (2014).

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Shuchi Chawla, Jason D. Hartline, Denis Nekipelov. 2016-06-02. A/B Testing of Auctions. https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00908

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