Related papers: Belief-Averaged Relative Utilitarianism
What is the best compromise in a situation where different people value different things? The most commonly accepted method for answering this question -- in fields across the behavioral and social sciences, decision theory, philosophy, and…
We explore conclusions a person draws from observing society when he allows for the possibility that individuals' outcomes are affected by group-level discrimination. Injecting a single non-classical assumption, that the agent is…
There is a lack of consensus within the literature as to how `fairness' of algorithmic systems can be measured, and different metrics can often be at odds. In this paper, we approach this task by drawing on the ethical frameworks of…
The maximum entropy principle can be used to assign utility values when only partial information is available about the decision maker's preferences. In order to obtain such utility values it is necessary to establish an analogy between…
We argue that many general evaluation problems can be viewed through the lens of voting theory. Each task is interpreted as a separate voter, which requires only ordinal rankings or pairwise comparisons of agents to produce an overall…
We consider the two-fold problem of representing collective beliefs and aggregating these beliefs. We propose modular, transitive relations for collective beliefs. They allow us to represent conflicting opinions and they have a clear…
Is the overall value of a world just the sum of values contributed by each value-bearing entity in that world? Additively separable axiologies (like total utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and critical level views) say 'yes', but…
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…
Shafer's theory of belief and the Bayesian theory of probability are two alternative and mutually inconsistent approaches toward modelling uncertainty in artificial intelligence. To help reduce the conflict between these two approaches,…
Arrow's theorem implies that a social choice function satisfying Transitivity, the Pareto Principle (Unanimity) and Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) must be dictatorial. When non-strict preferences are allowed, a dictatorial…
We propose a generalization of expected utility that we call generalized EU (GEU), where a decision maker's beliefs are represented by plausibility measures, and the decision maker's tastes are represented by general (i.e.,not necessarily…
When making a decision as a group, there are two primary paradigms: aggregating preferences (e.g. voting, mechanism design) and aggregating information (e.g. discussion, consulting, forecasting). Almost all formally-studied group…
If we accept Savage's set of axioms, then all uncertainties must be treated like ordinary probability. Savage espoused subjective probability, allowing, for example, the probability of Donald Trump's re-election. But Savage's probability…
Diversification is the typical investment strategy of risk-averse agents. However, non-diversified positions that allocate all resources to a single asset, state of the world or revenue stream are common too. We show that whenever finitely…
When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability.…
In several socioeconomic-critical decision-making settings, such as fair resource allocation, climate policy, or AI alignment, multiple principals interact within a common arena. While it is well established that these principals may have…
Utility functions or their equivalents (value functions, objective functions, loss functions, reward functions, preference orderings) are a central tool in most current machine learning systems. These mechanisms for defining goals and…
An individually costly act that benefits all group members is a public good. Natural selection favors individual contribution to public goods only when some benefit to the individual offsets the cost of contribution. Problems of sex ratio,…
This paper revisits impossibility results on the tyrannies of aggregation and non-aggregation. I propose two aggregation principles (quantitative aggregation and ratio aggregation) and investigate theoretical implications. As a result, I…
What fraction of the potential social surplus in an environment can be extracted by a revenue-maximizing monopolist? We investigate this problem in Bayesian single-parameter environments with independent private values. The precise answer…