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An employer contracts with a worker to incentivize efforts whose productivity depends on ability; the worker then enters a market that pays him contingent on ability evaluation. With non-additive monitoring technology, the interdependence…
Decision-making problems of sequential nature, where decisions made in the past may have an impact on the future, are used to model many practically important applications. In some real-world applications, feedback about a decision is…
We address the problem of online sequential decision making, i.e., balancing the trade-off between exploiting the current knowledge to maximize immediate performance and exploring the new information to gain long-term benefits using the…
Traditional randomized A/B experiments assign arms with uniform random (UR) probability, such as 50/50 assignment to two versions of a website to discover whether one version engages users more. To more quickly and automatically use data to…
The stochastic multi-armed bandit model is a simple abstraction that has proven useful in many different contexts in statistics and machine learning. Whereas the achievable limit in terms of regret minimization is now well known, our aim is…
We study the non-stationary stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, where the reward statistics of each arm may change several times during the course of learning. The performance of a learning algorithm is evaluated in terms of their…
We consider the Max $K$-Armed Bandit problem, where a learning agent is faced with several sources (arms) of items (rewards), and interested in finding the best item overall. At each time step the agent chooses an arm, and obtains a random…
Multi-armed bandit problems are the most basic examples of sequential decision problems with an exploration-exploitation trade-off. This is the balance between staying with the option that gave highest payoffs in the past and exploring new…
Ranking functions that are used in decision systems often produce disparate results for different populations because of bias in the underlying data. Addressing, and compensating for, these disparate outcomes is a critical problem for fair…
Companies that try to address inequality in employment face a hiring paradox. Failing to address workforce imbalance can result in legal sanctions and scrutiny, but proactive measures to address these issues might result in the same legal…
Machine learning models often preserve biases present in training data, leading to unfair treatment of certain minority groups. Despite an array of existing firm-side bias mitigation techniques, they typically incur utility costs and…
A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…
In this paper, we consider a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, MAB with cost subsidy, which models many real-life applications where the learning agent has to pay to select an arm and is concerned about optimizing…
The Greedy algorithm is the simplest heuristic in sequential decision problem that carelessly takes the locally optimal choice at each round, disregarding any advantages of exploring and/or information gathering. Theoretically, it is known…
Communication networks shared by many users are a widespread challenge nowadays. In this paper we address several aspects of this challenge simultaneously: learning unknown stochastic network characteristics, sharing resources with other…
Restless bandit problems are instances of non-stationary multi-armed bandits. These problems have been studied well from the optimization perspective, where the goal is to efficiently find a near-optimal policy when system parameters are…
Online platforms in the Internet Economy commonly incorporate recommender systems that recommend products (or "arms") to users (or "agents"). A key challenge in this domain arises from myopic agents who are naturally incentivized to exploit…
AI-driven recruitment systems, while promising efficiency and objectivity, often perpetuate systemic inequalities by encoding cultural and social capital disparities into algorithmic decision making. This article develops and defends a…
We propose a new sequential decision-making setting, combining key aspects of two established online learning problems with bandit feedback. The optimal action to play at any given moment is contingent on an underlying changing state which…
Sequential portfolio selection has attracted increasing interests in the machine learning and quantitative finance communities in recent years. As a mathematical framework for reinforcement learning policies, the stochastic multi-armed…