Related papers: Persuasion and Welfare
This paper proposes a framewrok for analyzing how the welfare effects of policy interventions are distributed across individuals when those effects are unobserved. Rather than focusing solely on average outcomes, the approach uses readily…
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…
It is common in recommendation systems that users both consume and produce information as they make strategic choices under uncertainty. While a social planner would balance "exploration" and "exploitation" using a multi-armed bandit…
Current methodologies in machine learning analyze the effects of various statistical parity notions of fairness primarily in light of their impacts on predictive accuracy and vendor utility loss. In this paper, we propose a new framework…
In democracies, major policy decisions typically require some form of majority or consensus, so elites must secure mass support to govern. Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass…
Interacting agents receive public information at no cost and flexibly acquire private information at a cost proportional to entropy reduction. When a policymaker provides more public information, agents acquire less private information,…
This paper studies identification and inference of the welfare gain that results from switching from one policy (such as the status quo policy) to another policy. The welfare gain is not point identified in general when data are obtained…
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 study a routing game in an environment with multiple heterogeneous information systems and an uncertain state that affects edge costs of a congested network. Each information system sends a noisy signal about the state to its subscribed…
While popularity bias is recognized to play a crucial role in recommmender (and other ranking-based) systems, detailed analysis of its impact on collective user welfare has largely been lacking. We propose and theoretically analyze a…
Designing fair algorithmic decision systems requires balancing model performance with fairness toward affected individuals: More fairness might require sacrificing some performance and vice versa, yet the space of possible trade-offs is…
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
We analyze demand settings where heterogeneous consumers maximize utility for product attributes subject to a nonlinear budget constraint. We develop nonparametric methods for welfare-analysis of interventions that change the constraint.…
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…
Most analyses of manipulation of voting schemes have adopted two assumptions that greatly diminish their practical import. First, it is usually assumed that the manipulators have full knowledge of the votes of the nonmanipulating agents.…
Many real-life settings of consumer-choice involve social interactions, causing targeted policies to have spillover-effects. This paper develops novel empirical tools for analyzing demand and welfare-effects of policy-interventions in…
This paper introduces a rule for policy selection in the presence of estimation uncertainty, explicitly accounting for estimation risk. The rule belongs to the class of risk-aware rules on the efficient decision frontier, characterized as…
Information about peers' performance is pervasive in workplaces, yet its effects on worker behavior are mixed. We show that a key reason is that workers differ in how they value such information. In a real-effort experiment with 793…
Societal biases that are contained in retrieved documents have received increased interest. Such biases, which are often prevalent in the training data and learned by the model, can cause societal harms, by misrepresenting certain groups,…
Agents often have individual goals which depend on a group's actions. If agents trust a forecast of collective action and adapt strategically, such prediction can influence outcomes non-trivially, resulting in a form of performative…