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People act upon their desires, but often, also act in adherence to implicit social norms. How do people infer these unstated social norms from others' behavior, especially in novel social contexts? We propose that laypeople have intuitive…
In many areas of engineering and sciences, decision rules and control strategies are usually designed based on nominal values of relevant system parameters. To ensure that a control strategy or decision rule will work properly when the…
The notion of preferences plays an important role in many disciplines including service robotics which is concerned with scenarios in which robots interact with humans. These interactions can be favored by robots taking human preferences…
Categories such as animal or furniture are acquired at an early age and play an important role in processing, organizing, and communicating world knowledge. Categories exist across cultures: they allow to efficiently represent the…
When making decisions under risk, people often exhibit behaviors that classical economic theories cannot explain. Newer models that attempt to account for these irrational behaviors often lack neuroscience bases and require the introduction…
This paper introduces nonparametric econometric methods that characterize general power law distributions under basic stability conditions. These methods extend the literature on power laws in the social sciences in several directions.…
A new constructivist approach to modeling in economics and theory of consciousness is proposed. The state of elementary object is defined as a set of its measurable consumer properties. A proprietor's refusal or consent for the offered…
Randomized trials are considered the gold standard for estimating causal effects. Trial findings are often used to inform policy and programming efforts, yet their results may not generalize well to a relevant target population due to…
People regularly share items using online social media. However, people's decisions around sharing---who shares what to whom and why---are not well understood. We present a user study involving 87 pairs of Facebook users to understand how…
We characterize the identified sets of a wide range of stochastic choice models, including random utility, various models of boundedly-rational behavior, and dynamic discrete choice. In each of these settings, we show two distributions over…
Literature involving preferences of artificial agents or human beings often assume their preferences can be represented using a complete transitive binary relation. Much has been written however on different models of preferences. We review…
Physics and economics are two disciplines that share the common challenge of linking microscopic and macroscopic behaviors. However, while physics is based on collective dynamics, economics is based on individual choices. This conceptual…
We tackle the problem of conditioning probabilistic programs on distributions of observable variables. Probabilistic programs are usually conditioned on samples from the joint data distribution, which we refer to as deterministic…
A general random effects model is proposed that allows for continuous as well as discrete distributions of the responses. Responses can be unrestricted continuous, bounded continuous, binary, ordered categorical or given in the form of…
In this paper, we consider the revealed preferences problem from a learning perspective. Every day, a price vector and a budget is drawn from an unknown distribution, and a rational agent buys his most preferred bundle according to some…
We propose a general methodology for recovering preference parameters from data on choices and response times. Our methods yield estimates with fast ($1/n$ for $n$ data points) convergence rates when specialized to the popular Drift…
Processes of mass communications in complicated social or sociobiological systems such as marketing, economics, politics, animal populations, etc. as a subject for the special scientific discipline - "mediaphysics" - are considered in its…
Strategic classification studies learning in settings where self-interested users can strategically modify their features to obtain favorable predictive outcomes. A key working assumption, however, is that "favorable" always means…
We study preferences estimated from finite choice experiments and provide sufficient conditions for convergence to a unique underlying "true" preference. Our conditions are weak, and therefore valid in a wide range of economic environments.…
A broad class of systems, including ecological, epidemiological, and sociological ones, are characterized by populations of individuals assigned to specific categories, e.g., a chemical species, an opinion or an epidemic state, that are…