Why you care: Before you can run any experiments, you must have instrumentation in place to log what is happening to the users and the system (e.g., website, application). Moreover, every business should have a baseline understanding of how the system is performing and how users interact with it, which requires instrumentation. When running experiments, having rich data about what users saw, their interactions (e.g., clicks, hovers, and time-to-click), and system performance (e.g., latencies) is critical.

Some accounts of the fiduciary relationship place trust and autonomy at odds with one another, so that trusting a fiduciary to act on one’s behalf reduces one’s ability to be autonomous. In this chapter, we critique this view of the fiduciary relationship (particularly bilateral instances of this relationship) using contemporary work on autonomy and ‘relational autonomy’. Theories of relational autonomy emphasize the role that interpersonal trust and social relationships play in supporting or hampering one’s ability to act autonomously. We argue that fiduciary relationships, understood through the lens of relational autonomy, can provide a means of enhancing, rather than diminishing, beneficiaries’ autonomy.

Why you care: You can run experiments either on a thin client, such as a web browser, or on a thick client, such as a native mobile app or a desktop client app. Changes for a webpage, regardless of whether it is frontend or backend, are fully controlled by the server. This is very different from a thick client. With an explosive growth of mobile usage, the number of experiments running on mobile apps has also grown (Xu and Chen 2016). Understanding the differences between thin and thick clients due to release process, infrastructure, and user behavior is useful to ensure trustworthy experiments.

In 2012, an employee working on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, suggested changing how ad headlines display (Kohavi and Thomke 2017). The idea was to lengthen the title line of ads by combining it with the text from the first line below the title, as shown in Figure 1.1.

The rule of law is about the law’s ruling. Law rules when it provides protection and recourse against the arbitrary exercise of power through the distinctive instrumentalities of law. But law can rule in a political community only when its official and lay members take responsibility for holding each other accountable under the law. An ethos of fidelity is fundamental to the vitality of the rule of law. However, it is often argued that a practice of accountability generates a culture of suspicion and distrust: accountability drives out trust. The demand for accountability stems from and publicly expresses distrust. But, then, if accountability is at the heart of the rule of law, and distrust is the condition and consequence of accountability, we cannot look to the rule of law to underwrite a robust program of controlling the exercise of ruling power. This the “trust challenge” to the rule of law. In this paper, I argue that the trust challenge can be met, that accountability does not depend on or express distrust. On the contrary, I argue, accountability is a key component of trust-supporting moral and social relationships. Fidelity and trust are compatible and mutually supporting.

This chapter teaches readers how to think about government regulations on pay. Although a lot is said about specific US laws, the primary focus is on how to think about regulation in general, so the discussion is portable across countries even where the local laws differ. Section 4.3 introduces a prescriptive mnemonic concept called the “3 Cs” of constraints: Comprehend, Circumvent, Comply. The idea is that managers first need to comprehend the constraints that impede their efforts to maximize company profit. They should then search for creative ways to circumvent those constraints (without violating ethics or the law). Finally, to the extent that they cannot circumvent the constraints, they must comply with them. The ethical issues surrounding the second of these Cs are discussed. Both anti-discrimination laws and wage-and-hour laws are discussed, including FLSA, ADA, ADEA, EPA, FMLA, and others. There is extensive discussion of floors and ceilings on both the monetary and non-monetary components of pay. An example of floors on paid time off draws on the concept of the marginal worker from Chapter 3 to show that regulations limit the variety of pay plans offered in the market.

How does nationalization of operations causally increase government revenue? Using the case of oil politics in prerevolutionary Iran, this chapter analyzes production elasticity and reduced informational asymmetries after the Shah of Iran nationalized the oil operations of BP and its partners. The chapter draws on a combination of conversations documented in archival records and quantitative analysis of historical fiscal data from the BP Archive. It begins by explaining the Shah’s surprise decision in January 1973 to reconfigure the National Iranian Oil Company from its role as a passive observer to a fully operational oil company able to set production levels and prices. The chapter then presents findings using BP’s revenue projections as counterfactuals to estimate the causal effects of the Shah’s decision with respect to whether NOC reform increased government take of oil revenues in 1974–1975 and whether revenues collapsed after retaliation by international oil companies in 1976 to strip the NOC of its ability to sell oil on the global market. The chapter illustrates both the nuances and consequences of operational versus nonoperational NOCs for fiscal strength.

The chapter develops a theory of public intervention in private governance. It examines the conditions under which a public authority will intervene and the form this intervention will take: standards and/or procedural regulations or the absence of intervention. The chapter explains that the type of public intervention depends on the interplay of two variables: the domestic benefits of product differentiation and the fragmentation of the private governance market. On the one hand, a pubic authority may intervene in the market for sustainably certified goods to improve the competitive position of domestic producers, who are the main rule targets of private governance schemes. On the other hand, a public authority can intervene to structure a fragmented private governance market in order to overcome problems such as supply chain confusion, a lack of credibility of existing private governance schemes, and trade and competitive distortions. The chapter further conceptualizes private governance schemes as interest groups that engage in lobbying. It also explains the dynamics of the theory in the context of the EU policymaking process and how the interventions may evolve over time.