Related papers: Justifications of Welfare Guarantees under Normali…
Neuroeconomics promises to ground welfare analysis in neural and computational evidence about how people value outcomes, learn from experience and exercise self-control. At the same time, policy and commercial actors increasingly invoke…
It is well known that ex ante social preferences and expected utility are not always compatible. In this note, we introduce a novel framework that naturally separates social preferences from selfish preferences to answer the following…
We develop an axiomatic framework to evaluate income distributions from the perspective of an opportunity-egalitarian social planner. Building on a formal link with the literature on decision theory under ambiguity, we characterize a class…
In a two-stage model of choice a decision maker first shortlists a given menu and then applies her preferences. We show that a sizeable class of these models run into significant issues in terms of identification of preferences…
We introduce a family of normative principles to assess fairness in the context of participatory budgeting. These principles are based on the fundamental idea that budget allocations should be fair in terms of the resources invested into…
Preferences of individuals are distributions of elements generated by generalized functions. Models of economic decision-making derived from such distributions are consistent with results of physiological experiments, and explain any…
When evaluating policies that affect future generations, the most commonly used criterion is the discounted utilitarian rule. However, in terms of intergenerational fairness, it is difficult to justify prioritizing the current generation…
A common assumption in modern microeconomic theory is that choice should be rationalizable via a binary preference relation, which \citeauthor{Sen71a} showed to be equivalent to two consistency conditions, namely $\alpha$ (contraction) and…
In the context of fair division, the concept of price of fairness has been introduced to quantify the loss of welfare when we have to satisfy some fairness condition. In other words, it is the price we have to pay to guarantee fairness.…
Valuation algebras abstract a large number of formalisms for automated reasoning and enable the definition of generic inference procedures. Many of these formalisms provide some notions of solutions. Typical examples are satisfying…
Counterfactual explanations are gaining prominence within technical, legal, and business circles as a way to explain the decisions of a machine learning model. These explanations share a trait with the long-established "principal reason"…
Counterfactual utilities evaluate decisions not only by the realized outcome under a given decision, but also by the counterfactual outcomes that would arise under alternative decisions. By generalizing standard utility frameworks, they…
This paper presents a welfarist approach to fair active power curtailment in distribution grids with distributed photovoltaics. We address the lack of consistent axiomatic foundations in existing ad-hoc curtailment rules by modeling the…
The maximum Nash social welfare (NSW) -- which maximizes the geometric mean of agents' utilities -- is a fundamental solution concept with remarkable fairness and efficiency guarantees. The computational aspects of NSW have been extensively…
Most analyses of manipulation of voting schemes have adopted two assumptions that greatly diminish their practical import. First, it is usually assumed that the manipulators have full knowledge of the votes of the nonmanipulating agents.…
Decision theory does not traditionally include uncertainty over utility functions. We argue that the a person's utility value for a given outcome can be treated as we treat other domain attributes: as a random variable with a density…
Although many investigators affirm a desire to build reasoning systems that behave consistently with the axiomatic basis defined by probability theory and utility theory, limited resources for engineering and computation can make a complete…
In [G. Kalai, A Fourier-theoretic Perspective on the Condorcet Paradox and Arrow's Theorem, Adv. in Appl. Math. 29(3) (2002), pp. 412--426], Kalai investigated the probability of a rational outcome for a generalized social welfare function…
Mechanism design for a social utility being the sum of agents' utilities (SoU) is a well-studied problem. There are, however, a number of problems of theoretical and practical interest where a designer may have a different objective than…
The econometric literature on treatment-effects typically takes functionals of outcome-distributions as `social welfare' and ignores program-impacts on unobserved utilities. We show how to incorporate aggregate utility within econometric…