Oxygen $+$ oxygen ($\mathrm{O}+\mathrm{O}$) collisions at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) offer a unique experimental opportunity to observe the onset of jet quenching in intermediate relativistic collision systems. As with the smaller proton-nucleus or larger nucleus-nucleus systems, measurements of centrality-selected high-$p_{\mathrm{T}}$ processes in $\mathrm{O}+\mathrm{O}$ collisions are expected to be sensitive to selection bias effects, which will be necessary to quantify or mitigate before a definitive conclusion on the presence of jet quenching. Using two Monte Carlo heavy-ion event generators, we provide a survey of centrality bias effects on high-$p_{\mathrm{T}}$ yield and correlation measurements. Some highlights of our findings include that (1) bias factors for the accessible kinematic range at RHIC show a nontrivial $p_{\mathrm{T}}$ dependence, compared to a negligible one at the LHC given the smaller accessible Bjorken-$x$ range, (2) centrality definitions based on multiplicity are less sensitive to bias effects than those based on the transverse energy, (3) the Angantyr generator gives qualitatively similar but larger-magnitude bias factors than Hijing, and (4) correlation measurements have a much smaller sensitivity to bias effects than do yield measurements. The findings here are intended to guide the experimental design and interpretation of $\mathrm{O}+\mathrm{O}$ jet quenching and other hard-process measurements.

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• Hard scattering
• Jet quenching
• Quark-gluon plasma
• Relativistic heavy-ion collisions