Related papers: Characterizing SW-Efficiency in the Social Choice …
We study efficiency in general collective choice problems where agents have ordinal preferences and randomization is allowed. We explore the structure of preference profiles where ex-ante and ex-post efficiency coincide, offer a unifying…
Social choice is the theory about collective decision towards social welfare starting from individual opinions, preferences, interests or welfare. The field of Computational Social Welfare is somewhat recent and it is gaining impact in the…
The purpose of this note is to prove the existence of a randomized mechanism, a social decision scheme (SDS), with desirable fairness, efficiency, and strategyproofness properties unmatched by all known SDSs. In particular, we disprove a…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly entrusted with high-stakes decisions that affect human welfare. However, the principles and values that guide these models when distributing scarce societal resources remain largely unexamined.…
Optimization models generally aim for efficiency by maximizing total benefit or minimizing cost. Yet a trade-off between fairness and efficiency is an important element of many practical decisions. We propose a principled and practical…
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…
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…
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…
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…
We consider the egalitarian welfare aspects of random assignment mechanisms when agents have unrestricted cardinal utilities over the objects. We give bounds on how well different random assignment mechanisms approximate the optimal…
Sequential allocation is a simple and attractive mechanism for the allocation of indivisible goods. Agents take turns, according to a policy, to pick items. Sequential allocation is guaranteed to return an allocation which is efficient but…
Scoring systems, as a type of predictive model, have significant advantages in interpretability and transparency and facilitate quick decision-making. As such, scoring systems have been extensively used in a wide variety of industries such…
Social intelligence in natural and artificial systems is usually measured by the evaluation of associated traits or tasks that are deemed to represent some facets of social behaviour. The amalgamation of these traits is then used to…
Decades of research in machine learning have given us powerful tools for making accurate predictions. But when used in social settings and on human inputs, better accuracy does not immediately translate to better social outcomes. To…
Many multi-agent socio-technical systems rely on aggregating heterogeneous agents' costs into a social cost function (SCF) to coordinate resource allocation in domains like energy grids, water allocation, or traffic management. The choice…
The performance of algorithms, methods, and models tends to depend heavily on the distribution of cases on which they are applied, this distribution being specific to the applicative domain. After performing an evaluation in several…
Policy makers need to decide whether to treat or not to treat heterogeneous individuals. The optimal treatment choice depends on the welfare function that the policy maker has in mind and it is referred to as the policy learning problem. I…
The analysis of complex networks permeates all sciences, from biology to sociology. A fundamental, unsolved problem is how to characterize the community structure of a network. Here, using both standard and novel benchmarks, we show that…
In several socioeconomic-critical decision-making settings, such as fair resource allocation, climate policy, or AI alignment, multiple principals interact within a common arena. While it is well established that these principals may have…
In this work, we propose an axiomatic approach for measuring the performance/welfare of a system consisting of concurrent agents in a resource-driven system. Our approach provides a unifying view on popular system optimality principles,…