Related papers: On Modeling Human Perceptions of Allocation Polici…
Behavioural economics provides labels for patterns in human economic behaviour. Probability weighting is one such label. It expresses a mismatch between probabilities used in a formal model of a decision (i.e. model parameters) and…
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
The beneficial effects of treatments vary across individuals in most studies. Treatment heterogeneity motivates practitioners to search for the optimal policy based on personal characteristics. A long-standing common practice in policy…
Decisions are often based on imprecise, uncertain or vague information. Likewise, the consequences of an action are often equally unpredictable, thus putting the decision maker into a twofold jeopardy. Assuming that the effects of an action…
Algorithmic predictions are increasingly informing societal resource allocations by identifying individuals for targeting. Policymakers often build these systems with the assumption that by gathering more observations on individuals, they…
When a policy prioritizes one person over another, is it because they benefit more, or because they are preferred? This paper develops a method to uncover the values consistent with observed allocation decisions. We use machine learning…
In this paper, we explore optimal treatment allocation policies that target distributional welfare. Most literature on treatment choice has considered utilitarian welfare based on the conditional average treatment effect (ATE). While…
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…
Current methodologies in machine learning analyze the effects of various statistical parity notions of fairness primarily in light of their impacts on predictive accuracy and vendor utility loss. In this paper, we propose a new framework…
Algorithmic predictions are increasingly used to inform the allocations of goods and interventions in the public sphere. In these domains, predictions serve as a means to an end. They provide stakeholders with insights into likelihood of…
This paper proposes an optimal policy that targets the average welfare of the worst-off $\alpha$-fraction of the post-treatment outcome distribution. We refer to this policy as the $\alpha$-Expected Welfare Maximization ($\alpha$-EWM) rule,…
Estimating the causal effect of a treatment or health policy with observational data can be challenging due to an imbalance of and a lack of overlap between treated and control covariate distributions. In the presence of limited overlap,…
With the rise of increasingly powerful and user-facing NLP systems, there is growing interest in assessing whether they have a good representation of uncertainty by evaluating the quality of their predictive distribution over outcomes. We…
We study fair allocation of constrained resources, where a market designer optimizes overall welfare while maintaining group fairness. In many large-scale settings, utilities are not known in advance, but are instead observed after…
Policymakers often face the decision of how to allocate resources across many different policies using noisy estimates of policy impacts. This paper develops a framework for optimal policy choices under statistical uncertainty. I consider a…
A decision maker typically (i) incorporates training data to learn about the relative effectiveness of treatments, and (ii) chooses an implementation mechanism that implies an ``optimal'' predicted outcome distribution according to some…
This paper introduces a rule for policy selection in the presence of estimation uncertainty, explicitly accounting for estimation risk. The rule belongs to the class of risk-aware rules on the efficient decision frontier, characterized as…
One of the most crucial issues in data mining is to model human behaviour in order to provide personalisation, adaptation and recommendation. This usually involves implicit or explicit knowledge, either by observing user interactions, or by…
How should social scientists understand and communicate the uncertainty of statistically estimated causal effects? I propose we utilize the posterior distribution of a causal effect and present the probability of the effect being greater…
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…