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Participants in socio-economic systems are often ranked based on their performance. Rankings conveniently reduce the complexity of such systems to ordered lists. Yet, it has been shown in many contexts that those who reach the top are not…
Equal opportunity is central to the concept of meritocracy. Opportunity and leadership should go to the people most qualified by performance, and not on the basis of arbitrary or irrelevant attributes. This principle is arguably most…
Strategic classification studies the design of a classifier robust to the manipulation of input by strategic individuals. However, the existing literature does not consider the effect of competition among individuals as induced by the…
Imitation is a key component of human social behavior, and is widely used by both children and adults as a way to navigate uncertain or unfamiliar situations. But in an environment populated by multiple heterogeneous agents pursuing…
Elites disproportionately influence policymaking, yet little is known about their fairness and efficiency preferences -- key determinants of support for redistributive policies. We investigate these preferences in an incentivized lab…
Humanity has been fascinated by the pursuit of fortune since time immemorial, and many successful outcomes benefit from strokes of luck. But success is subject to complexity, uncertainty, and change - and at times becoming increasingly…
We propose a new framework for imitation learning -- treating imitation as a two-player ranking-based game between a policy and a reward. In this game, the reward agent learns to satisfy pairwise performance rankings between behaviors,…
The occurrence of discrimination is an important problem in the social and economical sciences. Much of the discrimination observed in empirical studies can be explained by the theory of in-group favoritism, which states that people tend to…
Ranking models are typically designed to provide rankings that optimize some measure of immediate utility to the users. As a result, they have been unable to anticipate an increasing number of undesirable long-term consequences of their…
A planner aims to target individuals who exceed a threshold in a characteristic, such as wealth or ability. The individuals can rank their friends according to the characteristic. We study a strategy-proof mechanism for the planner to use…
Algorithmic predictions are increasingly informing societal resource allocations by identifying individuals for targeting. Policymakers often build these systems with the assumption that by gathering more observations on individuals, they…
Virtually anything can be and is ranked; people, institutions, countries, words, genes. Rankings reduce complex systems to ordered lists, reflecting the ability of their elements to perform relevant functions, and are being used from…
Humans do not always make rational choices, a fact that experimental economics is putting on solid grounds. The social context plays an important role in determining our actions, and often we imitate friends or acquaintances without any…
Classification algorithms are increasingly used in areas such as housing, credit, and law enforcement in order to make decisions affecting peoples' lives. These algorithms can change individual behavior deliberately (a fraud prediction…
Learning-based approaches for solving large sequential decision making problems have become popular in recent years. The resulting agents perform differently and their characteristics depend on those of the underlying learning approach.…
Competition is ubiquitous in many complex biological, social, and technological systems, playing an integral role in the evolutionary dynamics of the systems. It is often useful to determine the dominance hierarchy or the rankings of the…
When consequential decisions are informed by algorithmic input, individuals may feel compelled to alter their behavior in order to gain a system's approval. Models of agent responsiveness, termed "strategic manipulation," analyze the…
Among natural biological flocks/swarms or even mass social activities, when the collective behaviors of the followers has been dominated by the moving direction or opinion of one leader group, it seems very difficult for later-coming…
The Peter Principle posits that organizations promoting their best performers risk elevating employees to roles where their competence no longer translates, thereby degrading overall efficiency. We investigate when this dynamic emerges and…
Modern recommendation systems rely on the wisdom of the crowd to learn the optimal course of action. This induces an inherent mis-alignment of incentives between the system's objective to learn (explore) and the individual users' objective…