Related papers: Empirical Welfare Economics
Improving social welfare is a complex challenge requiring policymakers to optimize objectives across multiple time horizons. Evaluating the impact of such policies presents a fundamental challenge, as those that appear suboptimal in the…
In this work, we propose an axiomatic approach for measuring the performance/welfare of a system consisting of concurrent agents in a resource-driven system. Our approach provides a unifying view on popular system optimality principles,…
Schelling's model is an influential model that reveals how individual perceptions and incentives can lead to residential segregation. Inspired by a recent stream of work, we study welfare guarantees and complexity in this model with respect…
Research on promoting cooperation among autonomous, self-regarding agents has often focused on the bi-objective optimisation problem: minimising the total incentive cost while maximising the frequency of cooperation. However, the optimal…
From social networks to supply chains, more and more aspects of how humans, firms and organizations interact is mediated by artificial learning agents. As the influence of machine learning systems grows, it is paramount that we study how to…
We use an algebraic viewpoint, namely a matrix framework to deal with the problem of resource allocation under uncertainty in the context of a qualitative approach. Our basic qualitative data are a plausibility relation over the resources,…
In several socioeconomic-critical decision-making settings, such as fair resource allocation, climate policy, or AI alignment, multiple principals interact within a common arena. While it is well established that these principals may have…
The paper starts with a brief review of present understanding of income distributions; especially with regard to recent work in the field of econophysics that draws parallels between income, wealth and energy distributions. Examples of…
The broad concept of an individual's welfare is actually a cluster of related specific concepts that bear a "family resemblance" to one another. One might care about how a policy will affect people both in terms of their subjective…
We pursue an inverse approach to utility theory and consumption & investment problems. Instead of specifying an agent's utility function and deriving her actions, we assume we observe her actions (i.e. her consumption and investment…
We study the fair allocation of indivisible items to $n$ agents to maximize the utilitarian social welfare, where the fairness criterion is envy-free up to one item and there are only two different utility functions shared by the agents. We…
Large scale multiagent systems must rely on distributed decision making, as centralized coordination is either impractical or impossible. Recent works approach this problem under a game theoretic lens, whereby utility functions are assigned…
Motivated by a plethora of practical examples where bias is induced by automated-decision making algorithms, there has been strong recent interest in the design of fair algorithms. However, there is often a dichotomy between fairness and…
Multilateral index numbers are often used to make claims about welfare, such as treating PPPs as cross-country costs of living or real incomes as indicators of living standards. However, such interpretations may not be consistent with the…
In many applications such as rationing medical care and supplies, university admissions, and the assignment of public housing, the decision of who receives an allocation can be justified by various normative criteria. Such settings have…
Computational and economic results suggest that social welfare maximization and combinatorial auction design are much easier when bidders' valuations satisfy the "gross substitutes" condition. The goal of this paper is to evaluate…
In this paper, we study multi-agent systems with decentralized resource allocations. Agents have local demand and resource supply, and are interconnected through a network designed to support sharing of the local resource; and the network…
We study two stylized, multi-agent models aimed at investing a limited, indivisible resource in public transportation. In the first model, we face the decision of which potential stops to open along a (e.g., bus) path, given agents' travel…
Fair allocation of indivisible goods studies allocating $m$ goods among $n$ agents in a fair manner. While fairness is a fundamental requirement in many real-world applications, it often conflicts with (economic) efficiency. This raises a…
We propose a conceptual framework for counterfactual and welfare analysis for approximate models. Our key assumption is that model approximation error is the same magnitude at new choices as the observed data. Applying the framework to…