10. Networked Experiments

Across the sciences—social, biological, and physical alike—there is a pervasive interest in evaluating the effect of treatments or interventions of various kinds. Generally, the ideal is understood to be to evaluate the proposed treatment in a manner unmarred by bias of any sort. On the other hand, nature and circumstances often conspire to make achievement of this ideal difficult (if not impossible). As a result, there is by now a vast literature on the design, conduct, and analysis of studies for evaluating the efficacy of treatment.