Related papers: Preferences Yielding the "Precautionary Effect"
We explore conclusions a person draws from observing society when he allows for the possibility that individuals' outcomes are affected by group-level discrimination. Injecting a single non-classical assumption, that the agent is…
Decisions are often made by heterogeneous groups of individuals, each with distinct initial biases and access to information of different quality. We show that in large groups of independent agents who accumulate evidence the first to…
Nontransitive choices have long been an area of curiosity within economics. However, determining whether nontransitive choices represent an individual's preference is a difficult task since choice data is inherently stochastic. This paper…
To make decisions organisms often accumulate information across multiple timescales. However, most experimental and modeling studies of decision-making focus on sequences of independent trials. On the other hand, natural environments are…
Decision-making AI agents are often faced with two important challenges: the depth of the planning horizon, and the branching factor due to having many choices. Hierarchical reinforcement learning methods aim to solve the first problem, by…
An analyst observes the frequency with which a decision maker (DM) takes actions, but not the frequency conditional on payoff-relevant states. We ask when the analyst can rationalize the DM's choices as if the DM first learns something…
One of quantum theory's salient features is its apparent indeterminism, i.e. measurement outcomes are typically probabilistic. We formally define and address whether this uncertainty is unavoidable or whether post-quantum theories can offer…
We present a unified duality approach to Bayesian persuasion. The optimal dual variable, interpreted as a price function on the state space, is shown to be a supergradient of the concave closure of the objective function at the prior…
An agent choosing between various actions tends to take the one with the lowest cost. But this choice is arguably too rigid (not adaptive) to be useful in complex situations, e.g., where exploration-exploitation trade-off is relevant in…
Selective regression allows abstention from prediction if the confidence to make an accurate prediction is not sufficient. In general, by allowing a reject option, one expects the performance of a regression model to increase at the cost of…
We study what changes to an agent's decision problem increase her value for information. We prove that information becomes more valuable if and only if the agent's reduced-form payoff in her belief becomes more convex. When the…
We analyze and quantify, in a financial market with parameter uncertainty and for a Constant Relative Risk Aversion investor, the utility effects of two different boundedly rational (i.e., sub-optimal) investment strategies (namely, myopic…
Many real-life decisions involve both perceptual processes and weighing the consequences of different actions. However, the neural mechanisms underlying perceptual decisions have typically been examined separately from those underlying…
We consider active learning under incentive compatibility constraints. The main application of our results is to economic experiments, in which a learner seeks to infer the parameters of a subject's preferences: for example their attitudes…
We present a novel variant of decision making based on the mathematical theory of separable Hilbert spaces. This mathematical structure captures the effect of superposition of composite prospects, including many incorporated intentions,…
Making a decision is often a matter of listing and comparing positive and negative arguments. In such cases, the evaluation scale for decisions should be considered bipolar, that is, negative and positive values should be explicitly…
The revelation principle has been known in the economics society for decades. In this paper, I will investigate it from an energy perspective, i.e., considering the energy consumed by agents and the designer in participating a mechanism.…
Welfare economics relies on access to agents' utility functions: we revisit classical questions in welfare economics, assuming access to data on agents' past choices instead of their utilities. Our main result considers the existence of…
Empirical economists are often deterred from the application of fixed effects binary choice models mainly for two reasons: the incidental parameter problem and the computational challenge even in moderately large panels. Using the example…
Preferences of individuals are distributions of elements generated by generalized functions. Models of economic decision-making derived from such distributions are consistent with results of physiological experiments, and explain any…