6 research outputs found
A multi-cell experimental design to recover policy relevant treatment effects, with an application to online advertising
Experiments are an important tool to measure the impacts of interventions.
However, in experimental settings with one-sided noncompliance, extant
empirical approaches may not produce the estimands a decision-maker needs to
solve their problem. For example, these experimental designs are common in
digital advertising settings, but typical methods do not yield effects that
inform the intensive margin -- how much should be spent or how many consumers
should be reached with a campaign. We propose a solution that combines a novel
multi-cell experimental design with modern estimation techniques that enables
decision-makers to recover enough information to solve problems with an
intensive margin. Our design is straightforward to implement. Using data from
advertising experiments at Facebook, we demonstrate our approach outperforms
standard techniques in recovering treatment effect parameters. Through a simple
advertising reach decision problem, we show that our approach generates better
decisions relative to standard techniques
The development of the brazilian amazon region and greenhouse gases emission: a dilemma to be faced!
The purpose of this work is to verify the existence of possible tradeoffs between policies direct to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) with the ones direct to foster the development of the Brazilian Amazon Region, which is one of the poorest in the country. In order to achieve this goal, this paper uses an interregional input-output (I-O) model, estimated for the Brazilian economy for the year of 2004. The I-O model is used to make a comparison between the economical and the environmental relevance of each sector in the economies of the Amazon region and the rest of Brazil. This study considers the greenhouse gases emissions not only from the economic activities by itself, but, also for the more important factor of the land-use changes. This is a fact of most importance, given that in 2005, about 60% of the Brazilian GHGs emissions were due to the land-use change in its different biomes. Moreover, in the Brazilian Amazon region, especially in the last decades, the deforestation was linked mainly to economic factors than to policies conducted by the government. The results show that the sectors with the greatest importance in terms of emissions are cattle and soybean production. Also, they are also the most prominent for the region's economic development. This poses a dilemma that needs to be faced not only by Brazil, but also by the developed nations, as the burden of the reduction in the greenhouse gases emission in the Brazilian Amazon region cannot be only put on the poor population of the region!Amazon Region, Greenhouse Gases, Brazil, Input-Output, Economic Development, Productive Structure, Deforestation
Online Causal Inference for Advertising in Real-Time Bidding Auctions
Real-time bidding (RTB) systems, which leverage auctions to programmatically
allocate user impressions to multiple competing advertisers, continue to enjoy
widespread success in digital advertising. Assessing the effectiveness of such
advertising remains a lingering challenge in research and practice. This paper
presents a new experimental design to perform causal inference on advertising
bought through such mechanisms. Our method leverages the economic structure of
first- and second-price auctions, which are ubiquitous in RTB systems, embedded
within a multi-armed bandit (MAB) setup for online adaptive experimentation. We
implement it via a modified Thompson sampling (TS) algorithm that estimates
causal effects of advertising while minimizing the costs of experimentation to
the advertiser by simultaneously learning the optimal bidding policy that
maximizes her expected payoffs from auction participation. Simulations show
that not only the proposed method successfully accomplishes the advertiser's
goals, but also does so at a much lower cost than more conventional
experimentation policies aimed at performing causal inference
Parallel Experimentation in a Competitive Advertising Marketplace
When multiple firms are simultaneously running experiments on a platform, the
treatment effects for one firm may depend on the experimentation policies of
others. This paper presents a set of causal estimands that are relevant to such
an environment. We also present an experimental design that is suitable for
facilitating experimentation across multiple competitors in such an
environment. Together, these can be used by a platform to run experiments "as a
service," on behalf of its participating firms. We show that the causal
estimands we develop are identified nonparametrically by the variation induced
by the design, and present two scalable estimators that help measure them in
typical high-dimensional situations. We implement the design on the advertising
platform of JD.com, an eCommerce company, which is also a publisher of digital
ads in China. We discuss how the design is engineered within the platform's
auction-driven ad-allocation system, which is typical of modern, digital
advertising marketplaces. Finally, we present results from a parallel
experiment involving 16 advertisers and millions of JD.com users. These results
showcase the importance of accommodating a role for interactions across
experimenters and demonstrates the viability of the framework
Regional development and greenhouse gases emission: the case of the Amazon Region
The purpose of this work is to verify the existence of possible tradeoffs between policies direct to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) with the ones direct to foster the development of the Brazilian Amazon Region, considering its economic relations with the rest of the country and the international markets. In order to achieve this goal, this paper uses an interregional input-output (I-O) model, estimated for the Brazilian economy for the year of 2004. The I-O model is used to make a comparison between the economical and the environmental relevance of each sector in the Amazon region and the rest of Brazil. This study considers the greenhouse gases emissions not only from the economic activities by itself, but, also for the more important factor of the land-use changes. This is a fact of most importance, given that in 2005, about 60% of the Brazilian GHGs emissions were due to the land-use change in its different biomes. Moreover, in the Brazilian Amazon region, especially in the last decades, the deforestation was linked mainly to economic factors than to policies conducted by the government. The results show that the sectors with the greatest importance in terms of emissions are cattle and soybean production. Also, they are also the most prominent for the region's economic development. This poses a dilemma that needs to be faced not only by Brazil, but also by the developed nations, as the burden of the reduction in the greenhouse gases emission in the Brazilian Amazon region cannot be only put on the poor population of the region