News and blog posts from our students and faculty  A/B Testing
Ourselves To Death  Thursday, April 26th, 2012 | Posted by Jon
Kolko  There’s a great article on A/B testing in Wired today; if
you haven’t yet read it, you might read it now and then come
back. I feel like somehow, I keep finding myself in a contrarian
position related to Things That Are Going To Change Business,
and I don’t do it on purpose, honest. But I’m skeptical of A/B
testing, just as I’m skeptical of most experiment-driven
behavioral economics research, just as I’m skeptical of the use
of surveys to prove anything. And in all three cases, the
reasons are the same: behavior is complicated, the method is
overly reductive, and the approach ignores the magic and the
soul.  Behavior is complicated. I consume every book on
behavioral economics and decision making that I can get my hands
on, and while I can’t claim to understand all of what I read, I
can make a few generalizations.  First, we have two main systems
of decision making, one that’s