analytics

A New Classic in the Making: A/B Testing Joins HBI

A/B Testing has spent years quietly gaining an audience; now it’s gaining a bigger stage. Alongside our flagship titles – Customer Centricity, Startup Game, and OPEQ, A/B Testing is the newest addition to the Learning Lab’s lineup on HBI’s Marketplace. This dynamic simulation introduces the impact of machine learning on product development and marketing. 

In 2021, Wharton Interactive built this sim in collaboration with Kartik Hosanagar, the John C. Hower Professor of Technology and Digital Business and a Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Alex Miller, a full-stack scientist and engineer with expertise in applied statistics, A/B testing, causal inference, and machine learning.

An image of a smartphone with a seascape on the screen. The text welcomes users to Nanophone, indicating it's poised to revolutionize the smartphone industry in emerging markets.

Though Wharton Interactive closed in 2025, the interest in A/B Testing never wavered. This simulation was built on the principles of experimentation that now drive product decisions at every major tech company. It became clear from a continuous stream of usage requests from educators here in Philadelphia and as far away as Delhi that rehoming A/B Testing within the Learning Lab’s portfolio was a top priority.

Through a rekindled partnership with HBI, we’re excited to offer A/B Testing as our first new title on their platform in over a decade.

The A/B Testing Simulation teaches users how to design, run, and interpret randomized experiments to guide data-driven product and marketing decisions. Set in an e-commerce environment, players act as Nano’s Director of eCommerce as they test website components to increase smartphone sales while balancing the trade-off between acting quickly on limited data and gathering more information for greater accuracy.

Through practice and competitive tournament modes, players experience how A/B testing applies to real-world business strategy without requiring advanced statistics. The simulation emphasizes practical experimentation over traditional hypothesis testing and shows how machine learning methods tackle similar optimization challenges, ultimately building players’ intuition for evidence-based decision-making and the value of fostering a culture of experimentation.

Text displaying final results of a simulation or analysis, highlighting a 70% score and total profit of $1,428,651. It compares strategies and potential profits, including highest possible profit, random strategy profit, and default strategy profit. The graphic

We’ve been quiet, but we’ve been cooking! As the Learning Lab enters a new era of development, you can expect to see an influx of new titles become available. Whether that’s brand new Wharton-exclusive sims or new releases for worldwide use, we’re excited to share what we believe is the future of the classroom experience in our ever-evolving educational landscape.

 

Curious to see A/B Testing in action? Add the simulation to your coursepack through HBI’s marketplace and give it a go! Want to use the simulation in your Wharton classroom? Contact us learninglab@wharton.upenn.edu. 

Bringing Customer Centricity to Life (and Biz Models to Black)

customercen_photo_bookIf you’ve ever sat through one of Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader’s highly engaging lectures on the merits of a customer-centric business model (or read his book on the subject), then you know how quickly he’s able to convince an audience that adopting this game-changing go-to-market strategy can trump a product-focused approach (from a profitability standpoint), and that – if done well – can create the conditions for longterm viability in the perilous, race-to-the-bottom age of commoditization that many companies are grappling with these days.

He’ll also handily disabuse any naysaying marketing execs of the notion that using data is just about collecting numbers, driving the point home that simply having a CRM system in place is not where the work ends, it’s where it begins – and leaving no doubt in their minds that if they think all customers are created equal, they have a lot to learn. Indeed, Fader is a maestro at shifting paradigms to embrace the power of data analytics for calculating customer lifetime value (CLV). But for this revolution in marketing strategy to truly take hold, theory must meet practice – and that’s where the Learning Lab comes into play.

Read more Bringing Customer Centricity to Life (and Biz Models to Black) ›