How to design experiment and holdout for two types of treatment at the same time Let's say there are two types of treatment, namely treatment A and treatment B.
A subject can be in one of these categories:

*

*get treatment A and then treatment B.

*get treatment B and then treatment A.

*get only treatment A.

*get only treatment B.

*get no treatment.

There are several ways we can construct the control group. For example, we can:

*

*construct a pure control group who gets no treatment.

*construct control groups for treatment A and treatment B independently. A portion of the control subjects for treatment A may have gotten treatment B. In other words there can be overlap.

Edit: Note that I only have ability to design and assign control group in the experiment. The treatment order happens naturally in the test group without moderation.
Also the post-experiment analysis to estimate treatment effects get tricky since there are two types of treatment, and they may interact with each other.
Anyone have good pointers for reference I can read on?

Edit:
Context was requested in the comment section, so I'd like to provide some exemplar cases:
Weight study

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*Treatment A: doing yoga daily

*Treatment B: running 3 miles daily

*Metric: body weight in kg

Button on a web page

*

*Treatment A: change button's location

*Treatment B: change button's color

*Metric: click-through-rate

Completing online course

*

*Treatment A: chunking hour-long videos into smaller sessions

*Treatment B: sending reminder emails

*Metric: course completion rate

In general, carrying out multiple experiments to estimate effect of two types of treatment on the same metric requires more time and/or subjects and increases cost. It also ignores potential interaction effect of treatment A and treatment B.

When conducting these kinds of experiments there is a natural control-group for each marginal and conditional effect in the experiment.  The figure below shows an experimental flowchart for the possible categories of each participant.  The "No Treat" category acts as the control group for determining the marginal effects of Treatment A or B, the "Treat A" category acts as the control group for determining the conditional effect of Treatment B given Treatment A, and the "Treat B" category acts as the control group for determining the conditional effect of Treatment A given Treatment B.  (And of course, these last two groups might end up being effectively the same thing if the order of the treatments makes no difference; in case the order of treatment does make a difference, we leave them separately for now.)
Now, ideally you would be able to randomly assign your participants to these five groups and then undertake estimation of all the marginal and conditional causal effects in the process.  However, if you have no control over the occurrence of a second treatment given a first treatment then you cannot make reliable causal inferences about the conditional causal effects.  You can still estimate the relevant conditional distributions in a statistical sense, but the connection to causality is effectively lost.
As to references for causal inference, this depends largely on your existing knowledge of statistics and mathematics, and the degree to which you want a formalisation of the rules of causality.  A standard text in the field is Pearl (2009), but this is written for people who have some quantitative training in mathematics or statistics.    The main thing to remember when conducting causal inference is that it works by undertaking regular statistical modelling/inference (usually using regression analysis) in a context where we can sever causal relationships between variables using randomisation of assigned variables and blinding protocols.

