2016/05/30 by Guillaume W. Basse, Guillaume Basse, Basse, Guillaume W. +4 · 2 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Mathematics · #Applications (stat.AP) #Auction Theory and Applications #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Supply Chain and Inventory Management #cs.GT #stat.AP
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1605.09171
Appeared in Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2016
arxiv created 2016/05/30 · openalex publication_date 2016/05/30 · arxiv updated 2016/05/31 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Buyers (e.g., advertisers) often have limited financial and processing resources, and so their participation in auctions is throttled. Changes to auctions may affect bids or throttling and any change may affect what winners pay. This paper shows that if an A/B experiment affects only bids, then the observed treatment effect is unbiased when all the bidders in an auction are randomly assigned to A or B but it can be severely biased otherwise, even in the absence of throttling. Experiments that affect throttling algorithms can also be badly biased, but the bias can be substantially reduced if the budget for each advertiser in the experiment is allocated to separate pots for the A and B arms of the experiment.