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Causal Estimation of User Learning in Personalized Systems

Evan Munro, David Jones, Jennifer Brennan, Roland Nelet, Vahab Mirrokni, Jean Pouget-Abadie

arXiv 1 Jun 2023 · Statistics — Methodology · 2 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2306.00485 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

In online platforms, the impact of a treatment on an observed outcome may change over time as 1) users learn about the intervention, and 2) the system personalization, such as individualized recommendations, change over time. We introduce a non-parametric causal model of user actions in a personalized system. We show that the Cookie-Cookie-Day (CCD) experiment, designed for the measurement of the user learning effect, is biased when there is personalization. We derive new experimental designs that intervene in the personalization system to generate the variation necessary to separately identify the causal effect mediated through user learning and personalization. Making parametric assumptions allows for the estimation of long-term causal effects based on medium-term experiments. In simulations, we show that our new designs successfully recover the dynamic causal effects of interest.

Citation extraction

31
references
43
in-text mentions
31
distinct cited
2
self-citations
11,517
main-text words

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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Henning Hohnhold, Deirdre O'Brien, and Diane Tang (2015) Focusing on the Long-Term: It's Good for Users and Business. In Proceedings of the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on K…1.000124100%
2Soheil Sadeghi, Somit Gupta, Stefan Gramatovici, Jiannan Lu, Hao Ai,… (2022) Novelty and primacy: a long-term estimator for online experiments0.51121100%
3Susan Athey, Raj Chetty, Guido W Imbens, and Hyunseung Kang (2019) The surrogate index: Combining short-term proxies to estimate long-term treatment effects more rapidly and precisely0.40511100%
4Patrick Bajari, Brian Burdick, Guido W Imbens, Lorenzo Masoero, Jame… (2021) Multiple randomization designs0.40511100%
5Iavor Bojinov and Neil Shephard (2019) Time series experiments and causal estimands: exact randomization tests and trading0.40511100%
6Iavor Bojinov, Ashesh Rambachan, and Neil Shephard (2021) Panel experiments and dynamic causal effects: A finite population perspective0.40511100%
7Iavor Bojinov, David Simchi-Levi, and Jinglong Zhao (2022) Design and analysis of switchback experiments0.40511100%
8Dean Eckles, Brian Karrer, Johan Ugander, et al (2017) Design and Analysis of Experiments in Networks: Reducing Bias from Interference0.40511100%
9Andrey Fradkin, Elena Grewal, and David Holtz (2021) Reciprocity and unveiling in two-sided reputation systems: Evidence from an experiment on Airbnb0.40511100%
10Christopher Harshaw, Fredrik Sävje, David Eisenstat, Vahab Mirrokni,… (2021) Design and analysis of bipartite experiments under a linear exposure-response model self0.40511100%

Showing the top 10 of 31 scored citations.

Cited by, within the corpus

arXiv econ.EM papers that cite this one, ranked by how heavily they lean on it.

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1Estimating Effects of Long-Term Treatments0.40511