Related papers: Justifications of Welfare Guarantees under Normali…
Optimization is offered as an objective approach to resolving complex, real-world decisions involving uncertainty and conflicting interests. It drives business strategies as well as public policies and, increasingly, lies at the heart of…
We analyze the run-time complexity of computing allocations that are both fair and maximize the utilitarian social welfare, defined as the sum of agents' utilities. We focus on two tractable fairness concepts: envy-freeness up to one item…
Medical "Crisis Standards of Care" call for a utilitarian allocation of scarce resources in emergencies, while favoring the worst-off under normal conditions. Inspired by such triage rules, we introduce social welfare functions whose…
When designing a public transportation network in a country, one may want to minimise the sum of travel duration of all inhabitants. This corresponds to a purely utilitarian view and does not involve any fairness consideration, as the…
We explore the following question: Is a decision-making program fair, for some useful definition of fairness? First, we describe how several algorithmic fairness questions can be phrased as program verification problems. Second, we discuss…
This study proposes the General Bayes framework for policy learning. We consider decision problems in which a decision-maker chooses an action from an action set to maximize its expected welfare. Typical examples include treatment choice…
To determine the welfare implications of price changes in demand data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that the absence of cycles in this relation characterizes a consumer who trades off the utility of…
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…
We consider a simple sequential allocation procedure for sharing indivisible items between agents in which agents take turns to pick items. Supposing additive utilities and independence between the agents, we show that the expected utility…
In traditional justification logic, evidence terms have the syntactic form of polynomials, but they are not equipped with the corresponding algebraic structure. We present a novel semantic approach to justification logic that models…
Successful achievement of public policies requires satisfaction of conditions affecting political feasibility for policy adoption and maintenance as well as economic viability of the desired activity or enterprise. This paper discusses the…
A utility function has been proposed that values more those lives that are saved by not imposing a harmful treatment and values less those lives that could be saved by treating people who would otherwise die. I do not dispute the ethical…
How should well-being be prioritised in society, and what trade-offs are people willing to make between fairness and personal well-being? We investigate these questions using a stated preference experiment with a nationally representative…
Decision support systems (e.g., for ecological conservation) and autonomous systems (e.g., adaptive controllers in smart cities) start to be deployed in real applications. Although their operations often impact many users or stakeholders,…
Various structured argumentation frameworks utilize preferences as part of their standard inference procedure to enable reasoning with preferences. In this paper, we consider an inverse of the standard reasoning problem, seeking to identify…
Recent years have seen a boom in interest in machine learning systems that can provide a human-understandable rationale for their predictions or decisions. However, exactly what kinds of explanation are truly human-interpretable remains…
Two prominent objectives in social choice are utilitarian - maximizing the sum of agents' utilities, and leximin - maximizing the smallest agent's utility, then the second-smallest, etc. Utilitarianism is typically computationally easier to…
We consider a notion of rationalizability, where the rationalizing relation may depend on the set of feasible alternatives. More precisely, we say that a choice function is locally rationalizable if it is rationalized by a family of…
Recently, requirements for the explainability of software systems have gained prominence. One of the primary motivators for such requirements is that explainability is expected to facilitate stakeholders' trust in a system. Although this…
Machine learning methods are being increasingly applied in sensitive societal contexts, where decisions impact human lives. Hence it has become necessary to build capabilities for providing easily-interpretable explanations of models'…