Related papers: Distortion in Social Choice Problems: The First 15…
In a misspecified social learning setting, agents are condescending if they perceive their peers as having private information that is of lower quality than it is in reality. Applying this to a standard sequential model, we show that…
We axiomatically define a cardinal social inefficiency function, which, given a set of alternatives and individuals' vNM preferences over the alternatives, assigns a unique number -- the social inefficiency -- to each alternative. These…
We investigate how individuals form expectations about population behavior using statistical inference based on observations of their social relations. Misperceptions about others' connectedness and behavior arise from sampling bias…
We consider the general class of time-homogeneous stochastic dynamical systems, both discrete and continuous, and study the problem of learning a representation of the state that faithfully captures its dynamics. This is instrumental to…
This paper considers a problem where multiple users make repeated decisions based on their own observed events. The events and decisions at each time step determine the values of a utility function and a collection of penalty functions. The…
Optimization is offered as an objective approach to resolving complex, real-world decisions involving uncertainty and conflicting interests. It drives business strategies as well as public policies and, increasingly, lies at the heart of…
In the theory of social choice the research is focused around the projection of individual preference orders to the social preference order. Also, the justification of the preference order formalism begins with the concept of utility i.e.…
This paper considers a time-varying optimization problem associated with a network of systems, with each of the systems shared by (and affecting) a number of individuals. The objective is to minimize cost functions associated with the…
In this paper, we study the metric distortion of deterministic social choice rules that choose a winning candidate from a set of candidates based on voter preferences. Voters and candidates are located in an underlying metric space. A voter…
Biases with respect to socially-salient attributes of individuals have been well documented in evaluation processes used in settings such as admissions and hiring. We view such an evaluation process as a transformation of a distribution of…
Optimizing recommender systems based on user interaction data is mainly seen as a problem of dealing with selection bias, where most existing work assumes that interactions from different users are independent. However, it has been shown…
Humans have come to rely on machines for reducing excessive information to manageable representations. But this reliance can be abused -- strategic machines might craft representations that manipulate their users. How can a user make good…
Harsanyi (1955) showed that the only way to aggregate individual preferences into a social preference which satisfies certain desirable properties is ``utilitarianism'', whereby the social utility function is a weighted average of…
Decision-making with information displays is a key focus of research in areas like human-AI collaboration and data visualization. However, what constitutes a decision problem, and what is required for an experiment to conclude that…
We study the problem of minimizing metric distortion in multi-winner elections, where a committee of size $k$ is selected from a set of candidates based on voters' ordinal preferences. We assume that voters and candidates are embedded on a…
Social choice has become a foundational component of modern machine learning systems. From auctions and resource allocation to the alignment of large generative models, machine learning pipelines increasingly aggregate heterogeneous…
We study whether a social planner can improve the efficiency of learning, measured by the expected total welfare loss, in a sequential decision-making environment. Agents arrive in order and each makes a binary action based on their private…
We consider an information update system where an information receiver requests updates from an information provider in order to minimize its age of information. The updates are generated at the information provider (transmitter) as a…
In a setting where $m$ items need to be partitioned among $n$ agents, we evaluate the performance of mechanisms that take as input each agent's \emph{ordinal preferences}, i.e., their ranking of the items from most- to least-preferred. The…
Computing the rate-distortion function for continuous sources is commonly regarded as a standard continuous optimization problem. When numerically addressing this problem, a typical approach involves discretizing the source space and…