Related papers: Empirical Welfare Economics
A perfectly rational decision-maker chooses the best action with the highest utility gain from a set of possible actions. The optimality principles that describe such decision processes do not take into account the computational costs of…
How to distribute welfare in a society is a key issue in the subject of distributional justice, which is deeply involved with notions of fairness. Following a thought experiment by Dworkin, this work considers a society of individuals with…
Assuming that agents' preferences satisfy first-order stochastic dominance, we show how the Expected Utility paradigm can rationalize all optimal investment choices: the optimal investment strategy in any behavioral law-invariant…
Consider the following collective choice problem: a group of budget constrained agents must choose one of several alternatives. Is there a budget balanced mechanism that: i) does not depend on the specific characteristics of the group, ii)…
We consider item allocation to individual agents who have additive valuations, in settings in which there are protected groups, and the allocation needs to give each protected group its "fair" share of the total welfare. Informally, within…
Data-driven decision making plays an important role even in high stakes settings like medicine and public policy. Learning optimal policies from observed data requires a careful formulation of the utility function whose expected value is…
A common phenomena in modern recommendation systems is the use of feedback from one user to infer the `value' of an item to other users. This results in an exploration vs. exploitation trade-off, in which items of possibly low value have to…
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…
We study the problem of allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with subadditive valuations in a fair and efficient manner. Envy-Freeness up to any good (EFX) is the most compelling notion of fairness in the context of…
We study group decision making with changing preferences as a Markov Decision Process. We are motivated by the increasing prevalence of automated decision-making systems when making choices for groups of people over time. Our main…
We study welfare analysis for policy changes when supply and demand behavior are only partially known. We augment the robust approach pioneered by Kang and Vasserman (2025) by incorporating the supply side. We posit intervals of feasible…
What fraction of the potential social surplus in an environment can be extracted by a revenue-maximizing monopolist? We investigate this problem in Bayesian single-parameter environments with independent private values. The precise answer…
Now that machine learning algorithms lie at the center of many resource allocation pipelines, computer scientists have been unwittingly cast as partial social planners. Given this state of affairs, important questions follow. What is the…
A monopoly seller is privately and imperfectly informed about the buyer's value of the product. The seller uses information to price discriminate the buyer. A designer offers a mechanism that provides the seller with additional information…
We propose a set of conservative models in which agents exchange wealth with a preference in the choice of interacting agents in different ways. The common feature in all the models is that the temporary values of financial status of agents…
We consider a sharing economy network where agents embedded in a graph share their resources. This is a fundamental model that abstracts numerous emerging applications of collaborative consumption systems. The agents generate a random…
We study the nature (i.e., constructive as opposed to non-constructive) of social welfare orders on infinite utility streams, and their representability by means of real-valued functions. We assume finite anonymity and introduce a new…
We consider the problem of allocating multiple indivisible items to a set of networked agents to maximize the social welfare subject to network externalities. Here, the social welfare is given by the sum of agents' utilities and…
To successfully navigate its environment, an agent must construct and maintain representations of the other agents that it encounters. Such representations are useful for many tasks, but they are not without cost. As a result, agents must…
Welfare maximization in bilateral trade has been extensively studied in recent years. Previous literature obtained incentive-compatible approximation mechanisms only for the private values case. In this paper, we study welfare maximization…