Related papers: Preferences Yielding the "Precautionary Effect"
We examine the implications of consumer privacy when preferences today depend upon past consumption choices, and consumers shop from different sellers in each period. Although consumers are ex ante identical, their initial consumption…
What is intuitive: pro-social or anti-social behaviour? To answer this fundamental question, recent studies analyse decision times in game theory experiments under the assumption that intuitive decisions are fast and that deliberation is…
The ability to uncover preferences from choices is fundamental for both positive economics and welfare analysis. Overwhelming evidence shows that choice is stochastic, which has given rise to random utility models as the dominant paradigm…
There are clear benefits associated with a particular consumer choice for many current markets. For example, as we consider here, some products might carry environmental or `green' benefits. Some consumers might value these benefits while…
Human cooperation depends on how accurately we infer others' motives--how much they value fairness, generosity, or self-interest from the choices they make. We model that process in binary dictator games, which isolate moral trade-offs…
This work suggests modifications to a previously introduced class of heterogeneous agent models that allow for the inclusion of different types of agent motivations and behaviours in a unified way. The agents operate within a highly…
Data based judgments go into artificial intelligence applications but they undergo paradoxical reversal when seemingly unnecessary additional data is provided. Examples of this are Simpson's reversal and the disjunction effect where the…
Who should we prioritize for treatment when causal effects cannot be estimated? In practice, organizations often rely on predictive proxies: ads are targeted using purchase probabilities, and retention incentives are allocated using…
A principal wishes to transact business with a multidimensional distribution of agents whose preferences are known only in the aggregate. Assuming a twist (= generalized Spence-Mirrlees single-crossing) hypothesis and that agents can choose…
A common phenomena in modern recommendation systems is the use of feedback from one user to infer the `value' of an item to other users. This results in an exploration vs. exploitation trade-off, in which items of possibly low value have to…
Many prediction tasks can admit multiple models that can perform almost equally well. This phenomenon can can undermine interpretability and safety when competing models assign conflicting predictions to individuals. In this work, we study…
Revealed preference theory studies the possibility of modeling an agent's revealed preferences and the construction of a consistent utility function. However, modeling agent's choices over preference orderings is not always practical and…
When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability.…
People rationalize their past choices, even those that were mistakes in hindsight. We propose a formal theory of this behavior. The theory predicts that sunk costs affect later choices. Its model primitives are identified by choice behavior…
Large differences between the properties of the known sample of cataclysmic variable stars (CVs) and the predictions of the theory of binary star evolution have long been recognised. However, because all existing CV samples suffer from…
We provide simple models for the utility function (or psychology) of an actor trading a multitude of goods for money. In this framework, money has no intrinsic consumption value, but is required as a medium of exchange. A collection of such…
A sender with private preferences would like to influence a receiver's action by providing information through a statistical test. The technology for information production is controlled by a monopolist intermediary, who offers a menu of…
The lack of large-scale, continuously evolving empirical data usually limits the study of networks to the analysis of snapshots in time. This approach has been used for verification of network evolution mechanisms, such as preferential…
A widely applied diversification paradigm is the naive diversification choice heuristic. It stipulates that an economic agent allocates equal decision weights to given choice alternatives independent of their individual characteristics.…
A machine learning model may exhibit discrimination when used to make decisions involving people. One potential cause for such outcomes is that the model uses a statistical proxy for a protected demographic attribute. In this paper we…