Related papers: Belief-Averaged Relative Utilitarianism
We present a recommender system based on the Random Utility Model. Online shoppers are modeled as rational decision makers with limited information, and the recommendation task is formulated as the problem of optimally enriching the…
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…
Egalitarian considerations play a central role in many areas of social choice theory. Applications of egalitarian principles range from ensuring everyone gets an equal share of a cake when deciding how to divide it, to guaranteeing balance…
Standard decision theory seeks conditions under which a preference relation can be compressed into a single real-valued function. However, when preferences are incomplete or intransitive, a single function fails to capture the agent's…
The rise of artificial intelligence (A.I.) based systems is already offering substantial benefits to the society as a whole. However, these systems may also enclose potential conflicts and unintended consequences. Notably, people will tend…
Many multi-agent socio-technical systems rely on aggregating heterogeneous agents' costs into a social cost function (SCF) to coordinate resource allocation in domains like energy grids, water allocation, or traffic management. The choice…
How should we think of the preferences of citizens? Whereas self-optimal policy is relatively straightforward to produce, socially optimal policy often requires a more detailed examination. In this paper, we identify an issue that has…
Cooperation is fundamental for society's viability, as it enables the emergence of structure within heterogeneous groups that seek collective well-being. However, individuals are inclined to defect in order to benefit from the group's…
An important use of machine learning is to learn what people value. What posts or photos should a user be shown? Which jobs or activities would a person find rewarding? In each case, observations of people's past choices can inform our…
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.…
Human cooperation depends on how accurately we infer others' motives--how much they value fairness, generosity, or self-interest from the choices they make. We model that process in binary dictator games, which isolate moral trade-offs…
Altruistic behaviour is disadvantageous for the individual while is advantageous for its group. If the target of the selection is the individual, one would expect the selection process to lead to populations formed by wholly homogeneous…
Many collective decision-making settings feature a strategic tension between agents acting out of individual self-interest and promoting a common good. These include wearing face masks during a pandemic, voting, and vaccination. Networked…
Is it possible to understand or imitate a policy maker's rationale by looking at past decisions they made? We formalize this question as the problem of learning social welfare functions belonging to the well-studied family of power mean…
Many policies allocate harms or benefits that are uncertain in nature: they produce distributions over the population in which individuals have different probabilities of incurring harm or benefit. Comparing different policies thus involves…
We study a model of moral hazard with heterogeneous beliefs where each of agent's actions gives rise to a pair of probability distributions over output levels, one representing the beliefs of the agent and the other those of the principal.…
We consider a social system of interacting heterogeneous agents with learning abilities, a model close to Random Field Ising Models, where the random field corresponds to the idiosyncratic willingness to pay. Given a fixed price, agents…
This paper proposes a framewrok for analyzing how the welfare effects of policy interventions are distributed across individuals when those effects are unobserved. Rather than focusing solely on average outcomes, the approach uses readily…
The definition of preferences assigned to individuals is a concept that concerns many disciplines, from economics, with the search of an acceptable outcome for an ensemble of individuals, to decision making an analysis of vote systems. We…
Gilboa and Schmeidler's (1989) uncertainty aversion plays a central role in decision theory and economics, yet many inconsistent behaviors have been observed in experiments. Motivated by this, we study an axiom postulating a minimal degree…