Related papers: Persuasion and Welfare
An analyst observes the frequency with which an agent takes actions, but not the frequency with which she takes actions conditional on a payoff relevant state. In this setting, we ask when the analyst can rationalize the agent's choices as…
Biases with respect to socially-salient attributes of individuals have been well documented in evaluation processes used in settings such as admissions and hiring. We view such an evaluation process as a transformation of a distribution of…
Persuasion is a fundamental aspect of communication, influencing decision-making across diverse contexts, from everyday conversations to high-stakes scenarios such as politics, marketing, and law. The rise of conversational AI systems has…
We consider a platform facilitating trade between sellers and buyers with the objective of maximizing consumer surplus. Even though in many such marketplaces prices are set by revenue-maximizing sellers, platforms can influence prices…
This paper studies a general class of social choice problems in which agents' payoff functions (or types) are privately observable random variables, and monetary transfers are not available. We consider cardinal social choice functions…
Given only aggregate choice data and limited information about how menus are distributed across the population, we describe what can be inferred robustly about the distribution of preferences (or more general decision rules). We strengthen…
Artificial Intelligence (AI), and in particular, the explainability thereof, has gained phenomenal attention over the last few years. Whilst we usually do not question the decision-making process of these systems in situations where only…
Recommender systems leverage user demographic information, such as age, gender, etc., to personalize recommendations and better place their targeted ads. Oftentimes, users do not volunteer this information due to privacy concerns, or due to…
In the current landscape of ever-increasing levels of digitalization, we are facing major challenges pertaining to scalability. Recommender systems have become irreplaceable both for helping users navigate the increasing amounts of data…
Information access research (and development) sometimes makes use of gender, whether to report on the demographics of participants in a user study, as inputs to personalized results or recommendations, or to make systems gender-fair,…
I provide a model of rational inattention with heterogeneity and prove it is observationally equivalent to a state-dependent stochastic choice model subject to attention costs. I demonstrate that additive separability of unobservable…
Peer selection, the evaluation and selection of agents by their peers, is an important problem in the field of computational social choice; with applications to grading in massively online courses (MOOCs) and academic peer review. Current…
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…
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,…
Is it possible to understand or imitate a policy maker's rationale by looking at past decisions they made? We formalize this question as the problem of learning social welfare functions belonging to the well-studied family of power mean…
Information ecosystems increasingly shape how people internalize exposure to adverse digital experiences, raising concerns about the long-term consequences for information health. In modern search and recommendation systems, ranking and…
The membership inference problem for publicly released statistics from a private dataset is well-studied. When developing and formally analyzing attack strategies, however, the focus has been on attacks that model the population using only…
Rankings are ubiquitous in the online world today. As we have transitioned from finding books in libraries to ranking products, jobs, job applicants, opinions and potential romantic partners, there is a substantial precedent that ranking…
Bias exists in how we pick leaders, who we perceive as being influential, and who we interact with, not only in society, but in organizational contexts. Drawing from leadership emergence and social influence theories, we investigate…
Social choice functions help aggregate individual preferences while differentially private mechanisms provide formal privacy guarantees to release answers of queries operating on sensitive data. However, preserving differential privacy…