Related papers: Counterfactual and Welfare Analysis with an Approx…
Consider a setting with multiple units (e.g., individuals, cohorts, geographic locations) and outcomes (e.g., treatments, times, items), where the goal is to learn a multivariate distribution for each unit-outcome entry, such as the…
The purpose of this study is to explore whether the relationship between bias and nudges can be mathematically expressed in terms of quantum information theory, particularly by means of individually customized nudges. Based on the value…
The counterfactual distribution models the effect of the treatment in the untreated group. While most of the work focuses on the expected values of the treatment effect, one may be interested in the whole counterfactual distribution or…
Complements between goods - where one good takes on added value in the presence of another - have been a thorn in the side of algorithmic mechanism designers. On the one hand, complements are common in the standard motivating applications…
Parameter estimates in misspecified models converge to pseudo-true parameter values, which minimize a population objective function. Pseudo-true values often differ from quantities of economic interest, raising questions of how, if at all,…
Spectrum auctions are the primary mechanism through which governments allocate scarce radio frequencies, with outcomes that shape competition, coverage, and innovation in telecommunications markets. While traditional models of spectrum…
Sophisticated machine models are increasingly used for high-stakes decisions in everyday life. There is an urgent need to develop effective explanation techniques for such automated decisions. Rule-Based Explanations have been proposed for…
From the social sciences to machine learning, it has been well documented that metrics to be optimized are not always aligned with social welfare. In healthcare, Dranove et al. (2003) showed that publishing surgery mortality metrics…
Ensuring fairness in data driven decision making has become a central concern across domains such as marketing, lending, and healthcare, but fairness constraints often come at the cost of utility. We propose a statistical hypothesis testing…
Many macroeconomic policy questions may be assessed in a case study framework, where the time series of a treated unit is compared to a counterfactual constructed from a large pool of control units. I provide a general framework for this…
For the fundamental problem of allocating a set of resources among individuals with varied preferences, the quality of an allocation relates to the degree of fairness and the collective welfare achieved. Unfortunately, in many…
This paper revisits the classic instrument choice problem in a setting with consumption externalities, through the lens of robust mechanism design. A regulator can implement any incentive-compatible policy but is uncertain about how…
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…
We present pricing mechanisms for several online resource allocation problems which obtain tight or nearly tight approximations to social welfare. In our settings, buyers arrive online and purchase bundles of items; buyers' values for the…
A common method for assessing validity of Bayesian sampling or approximate inference methods makes use of simulated data replicates for parameters drawn from the prior. Under continuity assumptions, quantiles of functions of the simulated…
Counterfactual examples are one of the most commonly-cited methods for explaining the predictions of machine learning models in key areas such as finance and medical diagnosis. Counterfactuals are often discussed under the assumption that…
This paper considers quantile-welfare evaluation of social welfare as an alternative to utilitarian evaluation. Manski (1988) originally proposed and studied maximization of quantile utility as a model of individual decision making under…
This paper develops and implements a nonparametric test of Random Utility Models. The motivating application is to test the null hypothesis that a sample of cross-sectional demand distributions was generated by a population of rational…
We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among $n$ agents with the objective of maximizing Nash social welfare (NSW). This welfare function is defined as the geometric mean of the agents' valuations and, hence, it strikes a…
We show that the ability to consider counterfactual situations is a necessary assumption of Bell's theorem, and that, to allow Bell inequality violations while maintaining all other assumptions, we just require certain measurement choices…