Don't fly blind. See how the power of experiments works for you. When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind. That's what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book. It guides you through best practices in business experimentation, illustrates how these practices work at leading companies, and answers some fundamental questions: What makes a good experiment? How do you test in online and brick-and-mortar businesses? In B2B and B2C? How do you build an experimentation culture? Also, best practice means running many experiments. Indeed, some hugely successful companies, such as Amazon, Booking.com, and Microsoft, run tens of thousands of controlled experiments annually, engaging millions of users. Thomke shows us how these and many other organizations prove that experimentation provides significant competitive advantage. How can managers create this capability at their own companies? Essential is developing an experimentation organization that prizes the science of testing and puts the discipline of experimentation at the center of its innovation process. While it once took companies years to develop the tools for such large-scale experiments, advances in technology have put these tools at the fingertips of almost any business professional. By combining the power of software and the rigor of controlled experiments, today's managers can make better decisions, create magical customer experiences, and generate big financial returns. Experimentation Works is your guidebook to a truly new way of thinking and innovating.

This book presents a new, multidisciplinary perspective on and paradigm for integrative experimental design research. It addresses various perspectives on methods, analysis and overall research approach, and how they can be synthesized to advance understanding of design. It explores the foundations of experimental approaches and their utility in this domain, and brings together analytical approaches to promote an integrated understanding. The book also investigates where these approaches lead to and how they link design research more fully with other disciplines (e.g. psychology, cognition, sociology, computer science, management). Above all, the book emphasizes the integrative nature of design research in terms of the methods, theories, and units of study—from the individual to the organizational level. Although this approach offers many advantages, it has inherently led to a situation in current research practice where methods are diverging and integration between individual, team and organizational understanding is becoming increasingly tenuous, calling for a multidisciplinary and transdiscipinary perspective. Experimental design research thus offers a powerful tool and platform for resolving these challenges. Providing an invaluable resource for the design research community, this book paves the way for the next generation of researchers in the field by bridging methods and methodology. As such, it will especially benefit postgraduate students and researchers in design research, as well as engineering designers.

This is one of the few titles that brings together studies that adopt laboratory based experimental economics methods to study an array of business and policy issues, spanning the entire business domain, including accounting, economics, management, marketing and cognitive science.

Volumes II and III of Experimental Business Research include original papers that were presented at the Second Asian Conference on Experimental Business Research held at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) on December 16-19, 2003. The conference was organized by the Center for Experimental Business Research (cEBR) at HKUST and was chaired by Professors Amnon Rapoport and Rami Zwick. Experimental Business Research adopts laboratory based experimental economics methods to study an array of business and policy issues spanning the entire business domain including accounting, economics, finance, information systems, marketing and management and policy. "Experimental economics" is an established term that refers to the use of controlled laboratory-based procedures to test the implications of economic hypotheses and models and discover replicable patterns of economic behavior. We have coined the term "Experimental Business Research" in order to broaden the scope of "experimental economics" to encompass experimental finance, experimental accounting, and more generally the use of laboratory-based procedures to test hypotheses and models arising from research in other business related areas, including information systems, marketing and management and policy. The chapters included in these volumes reflect the domain diversity of studies in the experimental business research field.

Experimental Business Research includes papers that were presented at the First Asian Conference on Experimental Business Research held at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), on December 7-10, 1999. The conference was organized by the Center for Experimental Business Research (cEBR) at the HKUST. The papers presented at the conference and a few others that were solicited especially for this volume contain original research on individual and interactive decision behavior in various branches of business research including, but not limited to, economics, marketing, management, finance, and accounting. Experimental Business Research is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

We shall examine the validity of 16 experimental designs against 12 common threats to valid inference. By experiment we refer to that portion of research in which variables are manipulated and their effects upon other variables observed. It is well to distinguish the particular role of this chapter. It is not a chapter on experimental design in the Fisher (1925, 1935) tradition, in which an experimenter having complete mastery can schedule treatments and measurements for optimal statistical efficiency, with complexity of design emerging only from that goal of efficiency. Insofar as the designs discussed in the present chapter become complex, it is because of the intransigency of the environment: because, that is, of the experimenter’s lack of complete control.

This book gives students, practitioners, and managers a set of practical and valuable tools for designing and analyzing experiments, emphasizing applications in marketing and service operations such as website design, direct mail campaigns, and in-store tests.