The Price of Isolation: Estimating the Ecosystem Cost of Symmetric Two-Sided A/B Testing
On two-sided content platforms, symmetric two-sided isolation (assigning matched fractions of creators and viewers to isolated treatment and control submarkets) is widely used for creator-side and cold-start experiments because it removes cross-arm marketplace interference. Isolation, however, thins each viewer's candidate catalog, and intuition suggests the resulting engagement cost should fade as the platform grows: a small fraction of a vast catalog is still vast. We show that, in an order-statistics model of engagement, whether this intuition holds depends on the upper tail of match quality. Extreme-value theory yields tail-class loss laws with a sharp dichotomy: for light or bounded ...
| Authors | Yuanyuan Shen, Yiren Yan, Wenjie Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 5 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 August 2026 |
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