A/B Testing of Auctions
  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). 
Shuchi Chawla and Jason D. Hartline and Denis Nekipelov
cs.GT econ.TH