Industry Experts on Aligning Short-Term A/B Tests with Long-Term Goals
daveholtz · x · 2026-08-14
Online platforms prioritize long-term business outcomes, but typical A/B experiments are far too short to measure them directly.
A new paper, co-authored by industry experts and academics, shares practical insights on this dilemma. Key takeaways include:
- Reversals of sign from short-run to long-run treatment effects are rare, mostly concentrating in specific cases like clickbait, hyper-monetization, and pricing.
- A simple "univariate autosurrogate" (the short-run treatment effect on the long-run metric of interest) is often hard to beat.
- Simple, interpretable surrogates are generally preferable to elaborate models because they better improve actual decision-making.
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