Pragmatic A/B Test
A pragmatic A/B test is a randomized comparative experiment that evaluates two alternatives — a control (A) and a treatment (B) — under real-world operating conditions rather than tightly controlled laboratory settings. Rooted in the pragmatic-versus-explanatory trial distinction introduced by Schwartz and Lellouch in 1967 and brought to large-scale practice by online experimentation teams at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, it prioritizes decision-relevant effectiveness over internal mechanistic explanation.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Schwartz, D., & Lellouch, J. (1967). Explanatory and pragmatic attitudes in therapeutical trials. Journal of Chronic Diseases, 20(8), 637–648. · DOI 10.1016/0021-9681(67)90041-0
- Kohavi, R., Tang, D., & Xu, Y. (2020). Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing. Cambridge University Press. · ISBN 978-1108724265
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.