Papers for

online marketing teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

How the order of AI summaries shapes product opinions on Amazon

First Impressions: How Placement Shapes the Influence of AI Summaries

Abstract: AI-generated summaries increasingly mediate how people interpret information across platforms, including product reviews on e-commerce sites. Using Amazon's AI summaries as a case study, we conducted a preregistered, randomized experiment (N = 278) comparing how AI summaries and user reviews shaped product perceptions, and how their influence varied with valence and presentation order. We found that both AI summaries and user reviews influenced participants' opinions, with negative summaries having a larger effect than positive ones. Presentation order was the most important factor: the first source anchored judgment and only user reviews could displace an existing anchor. Although participants reported preferring user reviews, they often underestimated the influence of AI summaries on their judgments. Our findings show how the placement of AI summaries shapes user perception and highlight opportunities to design interfaces that support more deliberate judgments about when to rely on summaries and when to examine the underlying content directly.

Mon 14 SeptHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
People often see AI-generated summaries and user reviews when shopping online. This study found that both types of information change how people think about products, but the first thing they read has the biggest effect. Negative summaries influenced opinions more than positive ones, and only user reviews could change someone's mind after they saw a summary first. The researchers also discovered that people liked user reviews more but didn't realize how much the AI summaries affected their judgment.
Open 2609.14900v1

Bid aware filters reduce bias in real time bidding tests

BAFF: Bid-Aware Filter Family for Mitigating Training Data Interference in RTB A/B Tests

Abstract: In online A/B tests for real-time bidding (RTB), control and treatment models are typically trained on a shared serving log that includes data generated by the counterpart model. This shared-log training biases each model's training data through two channels: the counterpart model may have selected a different ad from the ad-candidate pool (ad-ranking disagreement) and may have bid a different price (bid-pricing disagreement), potentially distorting the A/B test outcome. Log-splitting eliminates the bias but sacrifices training data; log-sharing retains all data but leaves the bias unaddressed. We formalize the Bid-Aware Filter Family (BAFF), a class of (k,l)-parameterized hard filters that controls tolerance to each channel independently, providing a structured search space between these two extremes. We further propose a three-stage online measurement protocol that enables evaluating data-sharing strategies by their deviation from an interference-free reference model in production. In offline simulation, a (k,l) sweep surfaces operating points with smaller deviation from the interference-free reference model than both log-sharing and log-splitting. In a live RTB deployment on a demand-side platform (DSP), filter-based variants preserve the reference model's business metrics (e.g., CPC, CTR) more closely than both baselines. The best operating point is setting-dependent, underscoring the practical value of the search space itself.

Tue 8 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
In online ad auctions, companies test new bidding models by comparing them in A/B tests using shared data. However, this shared data can be biased because each model influences which ads and bids are recorded. The authors introduce a family of filters called BAFF that selectively controls how much data is shared between models to reduce this bias. Their method finds a middle ground between keeping all data and splitting logs completely, improving the accuracy of test results while preserving important information. They show in simulations and live tests that these filters keep the business outcomes closer to ideal, unbiased benchmarks.
Open 2609.08725v1