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Researchers do not know what the framers of the United States Constitution intended when they wrote of the general Welfare. Nevertheless, economists can conjecture by specifying social welfare functions that aim to express the preferences…
Expected Utility: Algebraic Expected Utility In this paper, we provide two axiomatizations of algebraic expected utility, which is a particular generalized expected utility, in a von Neumann-Morgenstern setting, i.e. uncertainty…
In the theory of social choice the research is focused around the projection of individual preference orders to the social preference order. Also, the justification of the preference order formalism begins with the concept of utility i.e.…
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…
Fair clustering has traditionally focused on ensuring equitable group representation or equalizing group-specific clustering costs. However, Dickerson et al. (2025) recently showed that these fairness notions may yield undesirable or…
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…
This paper considers quantile-welfare evaluation of social welfare as an alternative to utilitarian evaluation. Manski (1988) originally proposed and studied maximization of quantile utility as a model of individual decision making under…
We characterize Pareto optimality via "near" weighted utilitarian welfare maximization. One characterization sequentially maximizes utilitarian welfare functions using a finite sequence of nonnegative and eventually positive welfare…
We consider social welfare functions when the preferences of individual agents and society maximize subjective expected utility in the tradition of Savage. A system of axioms is introduced whose unique solution is the social welfare…
Group fairness definitions such as Demographic Parity and Equal Opportunity make assumptions about the underlying decision-problem that restrict them to classification problems. Prior work has translated these definitions to other machine…
To choose between two discrete goods, a consumer pays attention to only those with prices below a threshold. From these, she chooses her most preferred good. We assume consumers in a population have the same preference but may have…
We propose a new model for aggregating preferences over a set of indivisible items based on a quantile value. In this model, each agent is endowed with a specific quantile, and the value of a given bundle is defined by the corresponding…
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…
Approval voting is widely used for making multi-winner voting decisions. The canonical rule (also called Approval Voting) used in the setting aims to maximize social welfare by selecting candidates with the highest number of approvals. We…
We address an inherent difficulty in welfare-theoretic fair machine learning by proposing an equivalently axiomatically-justified alternative and studying the resulting computational and statistical learning questions. Welfare metrics…
This paper concerns Saez and Stantcheva's (2016) generalized social marginal welfare weights, which aggregate losses and gains due to tax policies, while incorporating non-utilitarian ethical considerations. The approach evaluates local tax…
We draw attention to an important, yet largely overlooked aspect of evaluating fairness for automated decision making systems---namely risk and welfare considerations. Our proposed family of measures corresponds to the long-established…
Motivated by several classic decision-theoretic paradoxes, and by analogies with the paradoxes which in physics motivated the development of quantum mechanics, we introduce a projective generalization of expected utility along the lines of…
We provide sufficient conditions under which a utility function may be recovered from a finite choice experiment. Identification, as is commonly understood in decision theory, is not enough. We provide a general recoverability result that…
The consideration of nonstandard models of the real numbers and the definition of a qualitative ordering on those models provides a generalization of the principle of maximization of expected utility. It enables the decider to assign…