Related papers: Empirical Welfare Economics
The classic house allocation problem is primarily concerned with finding a matching between a set of agents and a set of houses that guarantees some notion of economic efficiency (e.g. utilitarian welfare). While recent works have shifted…
This paper examines optimal risk sharing for empirically realistic risk attitudes, providing results on Pareto optimality, competitive equilibria, utility frontiers, and the first and second theorems of welfare. Contrary to common…
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…
To determine the welfare implications of price changes in demand data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that the absence of cycles in this relation characterizes a consumer who trades off the utility of…
The First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics assumes that welfare-bearing agents are autonomous and implicitly relies on a binary distinction between autonomy and instrumentality. Welfare subjects are those who have autonomy and…
Empirical Welfare Maximization (EWM) is a framework that can be used to select welfare program eligibility policies based on data. This paper extends EWM by allowing for uncertainty in estimating the budget needed to implement the selected…
We study the allocation of indivisible items that form an undirected graph and investigate the worst-case welfare loss when requiring that each agent must receive a connected subgraph. Our focus is on both egalitarian and utilitarian…
Information policies such as scores, ratings, and recommendations are increasingly shaping society's choices in high-stakes domains. We provide a framework to study the welfare implications of information policies on a population of…
Based on the observation that many existing discrete choice models admit a welfare function of utilities whose gradient gives the choice probability vector, we propose a new representation of discrete choice model which we call the…
We study the problem of allocating indivisible items to budget-constrained agents, aiming to provide fairness and efficiency guarantees. Specifically, our goal is to ensure that the resulting allocation is envy-free up to any item (EFx)…
We characterize Pareto optimality via "near" weighted utilitarian welfare maximization. One characterization sequentially maximizes utilitarian welfare functions using a finite sequence of nonnegative and eventually positive welfare…
Envy-freeness and Pareto Efficiency are two major goals in welfare economics. The existence of an allocation that satisfies both conditions has been studied for a long time. Whether items are indivisible or divisible, it is impossible to…
We study the fundamental problem of allocating indivisible goods to agents with additive preferences. We consider eliciting from each agent only a ranking of her $k$ most preferred goods instead of her full cardinal valuations. We…
We propose a new model for aggregating preferences over a set of indivisible items based on a quantile value. In this model, each agent is endowed with a specific quantile, and the value of a given bundle is defined by the corresponding…
To choose between two discrete goods, a consumer pays attention to only those with prices below a threshold. From these, she chooses her most preferred good. We assume consumers in a population have the same preference but may have…
We consider a simple sequential allocation procedure for sharing indivisible items between agents in which agents take turns to pick items. Supposing additive utilities and independence between the agents, we show that the expected utility…
We present a recommender system based on the Random Utility Model. Online shoppers are modeled as rational decision makers with limited information, and the recommendation task is formulated as the problem of optimally enriching the…
The econometric literature on treatment-effects typically takes functionals of outcome-distributions as `social welfare' and ignores program-impacts on unobserved utilities. We show how to incorporate aggregate utility within econometric…
Sequential allocation is a simple and attractive mechanism for the allocation of indivisible goods. Agents take turns, according to a policy, to pick items. Sequential allocation is guaranteed to return an allocation which is efficient but…
We study fair resource allocation under a connectedness constraint wherein a set of indivisible items are arranged on a path and only connected subsets of items may be allocated to the agents. An allocation is deemed fair if it satisfies…