Related papers: On The Probability of a Rational Outcome for Gener…
The well-known Impossibility Theorem of Arrow asserts that any Generalized Social Welfare Function (GSWF) with at least three alternatives, which satisfies Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) and Unanimity and is not a…
This paper provides a general framework to explore the possibility of agenda manipulation-proof and proper consensus-based preference aggregation rules, so powerfully called in doubt by a disputable if widely shared understanding of Arrow's…
In many real-world settings, a centralized decision-maker must repeatedly allocate finite resources to a population over multiple time steps. Individuals who receive a resource derive some stochastic utility; to characterize the…
Harsanyi (1955) showed that the only way to aggregate individual preferences into a social preference which satisfies certain desirable properties is ``utilitarianism'', whereby the social utility function is a weighted average of…
Facing an unknown situation, a person may not be able to firmly elicit his/her preferences over different alternatives, so he/she tends to express uncertain preferences. Given a community of different persons expressing their preferences…
In rank aggregation, the goal is to combine multiple input rankings into a single output ranking. In this paper, we analyze rank aggregation methods, so-called social welfare functions (SWFs), with respect to strategyproofness, which…
We study social welfare in one-sided matching markets where the goal is to efficiently allocate n items to n agents that each have a complete, private preference list and a unit demand over the items. Our focus is on allocation mechanisms…
We consider social welfare functions that satisfy Arrow's classic axioms of independence of irrelevant alternatives and Pareto optimality when the outcome space is the convex hull of some finite set of alternatives. Individual and…
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is a seminal result of Social Choice Theory that demonstrates the impossibility of ranked-choice decision-making processes to jointly satisfy a number of intuitive and seemingly desirable constraints. The…
Statistical parity metrics have been widely studied and endorsed in the AI community as a means of achieving fairness, but they suffer from at least two weaknesses. They disregard the actual welfare consequences of decisions and may…
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
What fraction of the potential social surplus in an environment can be extracted by a revenue-maximizing monopolist? We investigate this problem in Bayesian single-parameter environments with independent private values. The precise answer…
Social choice functions (SCFs) map the preferences of a group of agents over some set of alternatives to a non-empty subset of alternatives. The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem has shown that only extremely restrictive SCFs are strategyproof…
Empirical welfare analyses often impose stringent parametric assumptions on individuals' preferences and neglect unobserved preference heterogeneity. We develop a framework to conduct individual and social welfare analysis for discrete…
We consider randomized mechanisms with optional participation. Preferences over lotteries are modeled using skew-symmetric bilinear (SSB) utility functions, a generalization of classic von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions. We show that…
We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred.…
By relaxing the dominating set in three ways (e.g., from "each member beats every non-member" to "each member beats or ties every non-member, with an additional requirement that at least one member beat every non-member"), we propose a new…
A central theme in social choice theory is that of impossibility theorems, such as Arrow's theorem and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, which state that under certain natural constraints, social choice mechanisms are impossible to…
The Fourier Entropy-Influence (FEI) conjecture of Friedgut and Kalai [FK96] seeks to relate two fundamental measures of Boolean function complexity: it states that $H[f] \leq C Inf[f]$ holds for every Boolean function $f$, where $H[f]$…
Agents often have individual goals which depend on a group's actions. If agents trust a forecast of collective action and adapt strategically, such prediction can influence outcomes non-trivially, resulting in a form of performative…