The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World

How organizations–including Google, StubHub, Airbnb, and Facebook–learn from experiments in a data-driven world.

How organizations–including Google, StubHub, Airbnb, and Facebook–learn from experiments in a data-driven world.

Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you’ve probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments–also known as randomized controlled trials–designed to test the impact of different online experiences. Once an esoteric tool for academic research, the randomized controlled trial has gone mainstream. No tech company worth its salt (or its share price) would dare make major changes to its platform without first running experiments to understand how they would influence user behavior. In this book, Michael Luca and Max Bazerman explain the importance of experiments for decision making in a data-driven world.