Related papers: Affirmative Action vs. Affirmative Information

Response-adaptive allocation designs refer to a class of designs where the probability an observation is assigned to a treatment is changed throughout an experiment based on the accrued responses. Such procedures result in random treatment…

Abstaining classifiers have the option to abstain from making predictions on inputs that they are unsure about. These classifiers are becoming increasingly popular in high-stakes decision-making problems, as they can withhold uncertain…

We study a two-stage model, in which students are 1) admitted to college on the basis of an entrance exam which is a noisy signal about their qualifications (type), and then 2) those students who were admitted to college can be hired by an…

For many interesting tasks, such as medical diagnosis and web page classification, a learner only has access to some positively labeled examples and many unlabeled examples. Learning from this type of data requires making assumptions about…

Decisions are often made by heterogeneous groups of individuals, each with distinct initial biases and access to information of different quality. We show that in large groups of independent agents who accumulate evidence the first to…

Alternative data provides valuable insights for lenders to evaluate a borrower's creditworthiness, which could help expand credit access to underserved groups and lower costs for borrowers. But some forms of alternative data have…

The knowledge gap hypothesis suggests that the diffusion of information tends to increase rather than reduce social inequalities. Subsequent research on the digital divide has extended this perspective by focusing on unequal access to and…

In decision-making, individuals often rely on intuition, which can occasionally yield suboptimal outcomes. This study examines the impact of intuitive decision-making on individuals who are confronted with limited position information in…

Abstaining classifiers have the option to refrain from providing a prediction for instances that are difficult to classify. The abstention mechanism is designed to trade off the classifier's performance on the accepted data while ensuring a…

We study the problem of selecting the top-k candidates from a pool of applicants, where each candidate is associated with a score indicating his/her aptitude. Depending on the specific scenario, such as job search or college admissions,…

Data-based decisionmaking must account for the manipulation of data by agents who are aware of how decisions are being made and want to affect their allocations. We study a framework in which, due to such manipulation, data becomes less…

We study a model of a population making a binary decision based on information spreading within the population, which is fully connected or covering a square grid. We assume that a fraction of the population wants to make the choice of the…

We study the interplay of information and prior (mis)perceptions in a Phelps-Aigner-Cain-type model of statistical discrimination in the labor market. We decompose the effect on average pay of an increase in how informative observables are…

Positivity, the assumption that every unique combination of confounding variables that occurs in a population has a non-zero probability of an action, can be further delineated as deterministic positivity and stochastic positivity. Here, we…

While there has been a flurry of research in algorithmic fairness, what is less recognized is that modern antidiscrimination law may prohibit the adoption of such techniques. We make three contributions. First, we discuss how such…

The topic of this paper is prevalence estimation from the perspective of active information. Prevalence among tested individuals has an upward bias under the assumption that individuals' willingness to be tested for the disease increases…

Discrimination in selection problems such as hiring or college admission is often explained by implicit bias from the decision maker against disadvantaged demographic groups. In this paper, we consider a model where the decision maker…

Many important decisions in societies such as school admissions, hiring, or elections are based on the selection of top-ranking individuals from a larger pool of candidates. This process is often subject to biases, which typically manifest…

In school choice, students make decisions based on their expectations of particular schools' suitability, and the decision to gather information about schools is influenced by the acceptance odds determined by the mechanism in place. We…

Social identities are among the key factors driving behavior in complex societies. Signals of social identity are known to influence individual behaviors in the adoption of innovations. Yet the population-level consequences of identity…