Related papers: Empirical Welfare Economics
We study the problem of approximate social welfare maximization (without money) in one-sided matching problems when agents have unrestricted cardinal preferences over a finite set of items. Random priority is a very well-known…
We study the necessity of interaction between individuals for obtaining approximately efficient allocations. The role of interaction in markets has received significant attention in economic thinking, e.g. in Hayek's 1945 classic paper. We…
We investigate a model of sequential decision-making where a single alternative is chosen at each round. We focus on two objectives -- utilitarian welfare (Util) and egalitarian welfare (Egal) -- and consider the computational complexity of…
We provide sufficient conditions for semi-nonparametric point identification of a mixture model of decision making under risk, when agents make choices in multiple lines of insurance coverage (contexts) by purchasing a bundle. As a first…
In a two-stage model of choice a decision maker first shortlists a given menu and then applies her preferences. We show that a sizeable class of these models run into significant issues in terms of identification of preferences…
Many fairness criteria constrain the policy or choice of predictors, which can have unwanted consequences, in particular, when optimizing the policy under such constraints. Here, we advocate to instead focus on the utility function the…
This paper delves into financial markets that incorporate a novel form of heterogeneity among investors, specifically in terms of their beliefs regarding the reliability of signals in the business cycle economy model, which may be biased.…
I introduce a concave function of allocations and prices -- the economy's potential -- which measures the difference between utilitarian social welfare and its dual. I show that Walrasian equilibria correspond to roots of the potential:…
This paper investigates the value of recommendations for disseminating economic information, with a focus on frictions resulting from preference heterogeneity. We consider Bayesian expected-payoff maximizers who receive non-strategic…
We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among agents that have an identical subadditive valuation over the goods. The extent of fairness and efficiency of allocations is measured by the generalized means of the values that the…
For the fundamental problem of allocating a set of resources among individuals with varied preferences, the quality of an allocation relates to the degree of fairness and the collective welfare achieved. Unfortunately, in many…
Envy-freeness up to any good (EFX) is a central fairness notion for allocating indivisible goods, yet its existence is unresolved in general. In the setting with few surplus items, where the number of goods exceeds the number of agents by a…
We study a problem of optimal allocation in a discrete-time multi-period pure-exchange economy, where agents have preferences over stochastic endowment processes that are represented by strongly time-consistent dynamic risk measures. We…
We initiate the study of multidimensional Bayesian utility maximization, focusing on the unit-demand setting where values are i.i.d. across both items and buyers. The seminal result of Hartline and Roughgarden '08 studies simple,…
We study the problem of a planner who resolves risk-return trade-offs - like financial investment decisions - on behalf of a collective of agents with heterogeneous risk preferences. The planner's objective is a two-stage utility functional…
Iterative voting is a natural model of repeated strategic decision-making in social choice theory when agents have the opportunity to update their votes prior to finalizing the group decision. Prior work has analyzed the efficacy of…
Determining consumer preferences and utility is a foundational challenge in economics. They are central in determining consumer behaviour through the utility-maximising consumer decision-making process. However, preferences and utilities…
We initiate the study of the heterogeneous facility location problem with limited resources. We mainly focus on the fundamental case where a set of agents are positioned in the line segment [0,1] and have approval preferences over two…
Many policies allocate harms or benefits that are uncertain in nature: they produce distributions over the population in which individuals have different probabilities of incurring harm or benefit. Comparing different policies thus involves…
This paper develops theoretical criteria and econometric methods to rank policy interventions in terms of welfare when individuals are loss-averse. Our new criterion for "loss aversion-sensitive dominance" defines a weak partial ordering of…