Related papers: The Experimenters' Dilemma: Inferential Preference…
The goal of this paper is to provide mathematically rigorous tools for modelling the evolution of a community of interacting individuals. We model the population by a measure space where the measure determines the abundance of individual…
This paper investigates decision-making in A/B experiments for online platforms and marketplaces. In such settings, due to constraints on inventory, A/B experiments typically lead to biased estimators because of *interference* between…
How should we present training examples to learners to teach them classification rules? This is a natural problem when training workers for crowdsourcing labeling tasks, and is also motivated by challenges in data-driven online education.…
Numerous online services are data-driven: the behavior of users affects the system's parameters, and the system's parameters affect the users' experience of the service, which in turn affects the way users may interact with the system. For…
By classic results in social choice theory, any reasonable preferential voting method sometimes gives individuals an incentive to report an insincere preference. The extent to which different voting methods are more or less resistant to…
While usability evaluation is critical to designing usable websites, traditional usability testing can be both expensive and time consuming. The advent of crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower offer an…
We introduce and study a new class of stochastic bandit problems, referred to as predictive bandits. In each round, the decision maker first decides whether to gather information about the rewards of particular arms (so that their rewards…
In many social dilemmas, individuals tend to generate a situation with low payoffs instead of a system optimum ("tragedy of the commons"). Is the routing of traffic a similar problem? In order to address this question, we present…
Computational models of collective behavior in birds has allowed us to infer interaction rules directly from experimental data. Using a generic form of these rules we explore the collective behavior and emergent dynamics of a simulated…
The most frequently used method to collect research data online is crowdsouring and its use continues to grow rapidly. This report investigates for the first time whether researchers also have to expect significantly different hardware…
Personalisation is a standard feature of conversational AI systems used by millions; yet, the efficacy of personalisation methods is often evaluated in academic research using simulated users rather than real people. This raises questions…
A key question concerning collective decisions is whether a social system can settle on the best available option when some members learn from others instead of evaluating the options on their own. This question is challenging to study, and…
We empirically study the interplay between exploration and competition. Systems that learn from interactions with users often engage in exploration: making potentially suboptimal decisions in order to acquire new information for future…
It is very common to observe crowds of individuals solving similar problems with similar information in a largely independent manner. We argue here that crowds can become "smarter," i.e., more efficient and robust, by partially following…
The random utility model (RUM, McFadden and Richter, 1990) has been the standard tool to describe the behavior of a population of decision makers. RUM assumes that decision makers behave as if they maximize a rational preference over a…
Human reasoning often involves working over limited information to arrive at probabilistic conclusions. In its simplest form, this involves making an inference that is not strictly entailed by a premise, but rather only likely given the…
Recent lab experiments by Traulsen et al. for the spatial prisoner's dilemma suggest that exploratory behavior of human subjects prevents cooperation through neighborhood interactions over experimentally accessible time spans. This…
Choice overload - in which larger choice sets are detrimental to a chooser's well-being - is potentially of great importance in the design of economic policy. Yet the current evidence on its prevalence is inconclusive. We argue that…
Groups coordinate more effectively when individuals are able to learn from others' successes. But acquiring such knowledge is not always easy, especially in real-world environments where success is hidden from public view. We suggest that…
Employers are concerned not only with a prospective worker's ability, but also their propensity to avoid shirking. This paper proposes a new experimental framework to study how Principals trade-off measures of ability and prosocial behavior…