  Recommender systems have become an integral part of online platforms,
providing personalized recommendations for purchases, content consumption, and
interpersonal connections. These systems consist of two sides: the producer
side comprises product sellers, content creators, or service providers, etc.,
and the consumer side includes buyers, viewers, or customers, etc. To optimize
online recommender systems, A/B tests serve as the golden standard for
comparing different ranking models and evaluating their impact on both the
consumers and producers. While consumer-side experiments is relatively
straightforward to design and commonly employed to assess the impact of ranking
changes on the behavior of consumers (buyers, viewers, etc.), designing
producer-side experiments for an online recommender/ranking system is notably
more intricate because producer items in the treatment and control groups need
to be ranked by different models and then merged into a unified ranking to be
presented to each consumer. Current design solutions in the literature are ad
hoc and lacking rigorous guiding principles. In this paper, we examine
limitations of these existing methods and propose the principle of consistency
and principle of monotonicity for designing producer-side experiments of online
recommender systems. Building upon these principles, we also present a
systematic solution based on counterfactual interleaving designs to accurately
measure the impacts of ranking changes on the producers (sellers, creators,
etc.).

Methodology