Causal Inference Struggles with Agency on Online Platforms. (arXiv:2107.08995v2 [cs.LG] UPDATED)

Online platforms regularly conduct randomized experiments to understand how
changes to the platform causally affect various outcomes of interest. However,
experimentation on online platforms has been criticized for having, among other
issues, a lack of meaningful oversight and user consent. As platforms give
users greater agency, it becomes possible to conduct observational studies in
which users self-select into the treatment of interest as an alternative to
experiments in which the platform controls whether the user receives treatment
or not. In …

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