mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Personalizing Marketplace Policies with Competing Objectives and Constrained Experiments: Evidence from a Job Marketplace

arXiv 2606.30932 ↗First posted 29 Jun 2026cs.LG stat.AP stat.MEcited by 0

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Two-sided marketplaces connect distinct user groups whose interests often conflict -- improving outcomes on one side could degrade the other side's experience. To address this challenge, we deploy an integrated framework for personalizing free-value thresholds -- a policy governing the scope of complimentary services for job listings -- across a two-sided job marketplace connecting millions of employers and job seekers. Our personalized policy delivers statistically significant and economically sizable lift in the target metric while respecting engagement guardrail constraints. Direct application of standard uplift methods proves insufficient here for two reasons. First, cross-side externalities demand multi-objective optimization: maximizing employer-side metrics risks harming job seeker engagement, with effects varying substantially across job segments. Second, marketplace interference necessitates cluster-level randomization, limiting us to few discrete treatment levels -- effectively a form of positivity violation that rules out methods designed for continuous treatments. We contribute an integrated framework with three components. Our ensemble-based hybrid ranking models target and guardrail metrics separately, cutting guardrail risk by over 10% for equivalent target gains compared to single-objective approaches. A treatment effect extrapolation method extends our estimates from limited experimental variation to untested policy levels, relying on monotonicity assumptions that we validate empirically. Finally, we present production deployment, where post-launch data confirms both extrapolation accuracy and guardrail compliance. Our deployed system demonstrates that principled methodology can enable meaningful personalization even when experiments are severely constrained and different objectives compete -- common conditions that characterize many real-world marketplaces.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 14 of its 29 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2026.

Builds on

14 of 29 references.

References · 14

  1. 2015Estimation and Inference of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects using Random Forestscited by 600
  2. 2019Introduction to Multi-Armed Banditscited by 481
  3. 2017Meta-learners for Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects using Machine Learningcited by 478
  4. 2017Quasi-Oracle Estimation of Heterogeneous Treatment Effectscited by 332
  5. 2016Generalized Random Forestscited by 312
  6. 2019Linear Stochastic Bandits Under Safety Constraintscited by 90
  7. 2020CausalML: Python Package for Causal Machine Learningcited by 74
  8. 2015Nonparametric methods for doubly robust estimation of continuous treatment effectscited by 64
  9. 2020Experimental Design in Two-Sided Platforms: An Analysis of Biascited by 39
  10. 2019Response Transformation and Profit Decomposition for Revenue Uplift Modelingcited by 15
  11. 2023Uplift Modeling: from Causal Inference to Personalizationcited by 5
  12. 2024Uplift modeling with continuous treatments: A predict-then-optimize approachcited by 4
2 more
  1. 2024Coarse-to-fine Dynamic Uplift Modeling for Real-time Video Recommendationcited by 3
  2. 2023Causal Inference for Continuous Multiple Time Point Interventionscited by 2

Built on by

Not cited yet.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Unmasking Hiring Bias: Platform Data Analysis and Controlled Experiments on Bias in Online Freelance Marketplaces via RAG-LLM Generated Contents ↗
  2. 2026When Hiring Becomes Agent-Mediated: Evaluating Access and Recurrence in Two-Agent R'esum'e Screening
  3. 2026Evaluating LLM Behavior in Hiring: Implicit Weights, Fairness Across Groups, and Alignment with Human Preferences
  4. 2026Source Preference in the Wild: How LLM Agents Favor Items by Source, and How to Reduce It
  5. 2025Magentic Marketplace: An Open-Source Environment for Studying Agentic Markets
  6. 2026Multi-Stakeholder LLM Alignment: Decomposing Estimation from Aggregation
  7. 2026CAVEAT: Towards Robust Computer-Use Agents in Incentive-Misaligned Environments
  8. 2025Guardrailed Uplift Targeting: A Causal Optimization Playbook for Marketing Strategy