Design and Evaluation of Personalized Free Trials

Hema Yoganarasimhan; Ebrahim Barzegary; Abhishek Pani

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2006.13420

Design and Evaluation of Personalized Free Trials

Hema Yoganarasimhan·Ebrahim Barzegary·Abhishek Pani

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Free trial promotions, where users are given a limited time to try the product for free, are a commonly used customer acquisition strategy in the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry. We examine how trial length affect users' responsiveness, and seek to quantify the gains from personalizing the length of the free trial promotions. Our data come from a large-scale field experiment conducted by a leading SaaS firm, where new users were randomly assigned to 7, 14, or 30 days of free trial. First, we show that the 7-day trial to all consumers is the best uniform policy, with a 5.59% increase in subscriptions. Next, we develop a three-pronged framework for personalized policy design and evaluation. Using our framework, we develop seven personalized targeting policies based on linear regression, lasso, CART, random forest, XGBoost, causal tree, and causal forest, and evaluate their performances using the Inverse Propensity Score (IPS) estimator. We find that the personalized policy based on lasso performs the best, followed by the one based on XGBoost. In contrast, policies based on causal tree and causal forest perform poorly. We then link a method's effectiveness in designing policy with its ability to personalize the treatment sufficiently without over-fitting (i.e., capture spurious heterogeneity). Next, we segment consumers based on their optimal trial length and derive some substantive insights on the drivers of user behavior in this context. Finally, we show that policies designed to maximize short-run conversions also perform well on long-run outcomes such as consumer loyalty and profitability.

Explore related subjects

stat.ML cs.LG econ.EM

Keep this discovery

BibTeX RIS

Hema Yoganarasimhan, Ebrahim Barzegary, Abhishek Pani. 2020-06-24. Design and Evaluation of Personalized Free Trials. https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.13420

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

A Hilbert-Valued Functional Decomposition Framework for Explaining Time-Dependent Outputs

Feature-based explanations quantify features' influence on model predictions, but are primarily designed for scalar outputs. In many applications, however, outputs are functional or multivariate, such as time-dependent trajectories in demand forecasting. Consequently, existing approaches typically explain each output location independently, ignoring dependencies across the output components. We address this limitation by developing a unified framework for feature-based explanations of time-dependent outputs. Specifically, we generalize functional decomposition to Hilbert-valued prediction functions and extend an existing feature-based explanation framework to this setting. Our framework introduces kernel-based output representations that enable time-dependency-aware explanations at multiple levels of temporal granularity, including time-specific, time-resolved, and time-aggregated, while providing a unified view in which existing methods arise as special cases. We validate our framework on synthetic and real-world data, including intraday financial market volatility prediction and energy demand forecasting.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2026

Risk-Averse Decision Making with Multi-Level Reliability Guarantees

Many applications in engineering, including wireless broadcasting, require designs that provide performance certificates at different target outage levels. This paper studies the problem of maximizing the weighted average of such certificates in the presence of uncertainty about the true system state. The problem is shown to be equivalent to an optimization over nested prediction sets, connecting to the literature on conformal prediction and extending prior art on single-level risk-averse decision making. Furthermore, we derive a dual formulation that decouples optimization across input values. Numerical experiments on a diversity-based wireless transmission system illustrate the cost of enforcing multi-level certificates with a single shared policy and trace the Pareto trade-off between multiple reliability levels.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2026

A distribution-free certification framework for trustworthy crash-severity prediction

Crash-severity models inform screening, dispatch and site prioritization, yet are deployed without a finite-sample statement of what one prediction means. Off-the-shelf guarantees fail here, because the features that make crash severity distinctive defeat them: the KABCO outcome is ordinal, the recorded label is a field assessment agreeing with medical severity about half the time, erring in a structured way, and deployment crosses jurisdictions and years calibration never saw. We develop a certification layer that wraps any severity model unmodified, with distribution-free guarantees using this structure: contiguous ordinal sets that read as "B or worse"; per-class validity for any pre-declared partition, with an oracle efficiency characterization; transfer of coverage to unobserved true severity through a declared reporting band, with a worst-case sharpness result; a one-sided certificate under deployment shift; and severity-weighted risk control. The guarantees compose with an attributable slack budget. The same analysis bounds what certification can achieve. A certified set's informativeness is governed by a functional of the true law that no base model can evade and that cannot be lower-bounded distribution-free; given a declared misreporting channel identified from record-linkage data, a nonvacuous lower bound on that floor becomes computable. On 5.2 million Texas records across seven base models spanning four decades, the layer attaches identical validity and certifies, on the vulnerable road users, a model-independent floor on set width that no base model beats, separating it from a remainder that stays bounded but distribution-free unidentifiable. The framework is released as an open-source package with theorem-level tests.

stat.ML↗