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The introduction of new payment methods has resulted in one of the most significant changes in the way we consume goods and services. In this paper, I present results of a field and a laboratory experiment designed to determine the effect…
This paper develops generalizations of empowerment to continuous states. Empowerment is a recently introduced information-theoretic quantity motivated by hypotheses about the efficiency of the sensorimotor loop in biological organisms, but…
Many marketing applications, including credit card incentive programs, offer rewards to customers who exceed specific spending thresholds to encourage increased consumption. Quantifying the causal effect of these thresholds on customers is…
Partnering with a large online retailer, we consider the problem of sending daily personalized promotions to a userbase of over 20 million customers. We propose an efficient policy for determining, every day, the promotion that each…
Online advertising platforms use automated auctions to connect advertisers with potential customers, requiring effective bidding strategies to maximize profits. Accurate ad impact estimation requires considering three key factors: delayed…
In classic instruction following, language like "I'd like the JetBlue flight" maps to actions (e.g., selecting that flight). However, language also conveys information about a user's underlying reward function (e.g., a general preference…
Auctions in which agents' payoffs are random variables have received increased attention in recent years. In particular, recent work in algorithmic mechanism design has produced mechanisms employing internal randomization, partly in…
Introducing environmental feedback into evolutionary game theory has led to the development of eco-evolutionary games, which have gained popularity due to their ability to capture the intricate interplay between the environment and…
Positive affect has been linked to increased interest, curiosity and satisfaction in human learning. In reinforcement learning, extrinsic rewards are often sparse and difficult to define, intrinsically motivated learning can help address…
A demandance is a psychological "pull" exerted by a stimulus. It is closely related to the theory of "affordance". I introduce the theory of demandance, offer some motivating examples, briefly explore its psychological basis, and examine…
In this paper, based on a weighted projection of the user-object bipartite network, we study the effects of user tastes on the mass-diffusion-based personalized recommendation algorithm, where a user's tastes or interests are defined by the…
An operator-assisted user-provided network (UPN) has the potential to achieve a low cost ubiquitous Internet connectivity, without significantly increasing the network infrastructure investment. In this paper, we consider such a network…
We provide new insights regarding the headline result that Medicaid increased emergency department (ED) use from the Oregon experiment. We find meaningful heterogeneous impacts of Medicaid on ED use using causal machine learning methods.…
Modeling the preferences of agents over a set of alternatives is a principal concern in many areas. The dominant approach has been to find a single reward/utility function with the property that alternatives yielding higher rewards are…
A generalized additive mixed model was estimated to investigate the factors that impact ridehailing driver trip request acceptance choices, relying on 200 responses from a stated preference survey in Seattle, US. Several policy…
Auction theories are believed to provide a better selling opportunity for the resources to be allocated. Various organizations have taken measures to increase trust among participants towards their auction system, but trust alone cannot…
Can temporary subsidies to bundles induce long-run changes in demand due to learning about the quality of one of the constituent goods? This paper provides theoretical support and empirical evidence on this mechanism. Theoretically, we…
As algorithmic tools increasingly aid experts in making consequential decisions, the need to understand the precise factors that mediate their influence has grown commensurately. In this paper, we present a crowdsourcing vignette study…
In non-network settings, encouragement designs have been widely used to analyze causal effects of a treatment, policy, or intervention on an outcome of interest when randomizing the treatment was considered impractical or when compliance to…
This paper explores an intrinsic motivation for mutual awareness, hypothesizing that humans possess a fundamental drive to understand and to be understood even in the absence of extrinsic rewards. Through simulations of the perceptual…