Related papers: Personalized Subsidy Rules
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…
Existing research on the static effects of the manipulation of welfare program benefit parameters on labor supply has allowed only restrictive forms of heterogeneity in preferences. Yet preference heterogeneity implies that the marginal…
Overcoming the impact of selfish behavior of rational players in multiagent systems is a fundamental problem in game theory. Without any intervention from a central agent, strategic users take actions in order to maximize their personal…
Individual human decision-makers may benefit from different forms of support to improve decision outcomes, but when each form of support will yield better outcomes? In this work, we posit that personalizing access to decision support tools…
Several behavioral, social, and public health interventions, such as suicide/HIV prevention or community preparedness against natural disasters, leverage social network information to maximize outreach. Algorithmic influence maximization…
This paper proposes a novel method to estimate individualised treatment assignment rules. The method is designed to find rules that are stochastic, reflecting uncertainty in estimation of an assignment rule and about its welfare…
The econometric literature on treatment-effects typically takes functionals of outcome-distributions as `social welfare' and ignores program-impacts on unobserved utilities. We show how to incorporate aggregate utility within econometric…
Threshold policies are decision rules that assign treatments based on whether an observable characteristic exceeds a certain threshold. They are widespread across multiple domains, including welfare programs, taxation, and clinical…
We study the optimal joint intervention of a planner who can influence both the standalone marginal utilities of agents in a network and the weights of the links connecting them. The welfare-maximizing intervention displays two key…
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…
This paper studies a penalized statistical decision rule for the treatment assignment problem. Consider the setting of a utilitarian policy maker who must use sample data to allocate a binary treatment to members of a population, based on…
We study the subtlety of optimal paternalism when a utilitarian planner has the power to design a discrete choice set for a heterogeneous population with bounded rationality. We first consider the planning problem in abstraction. We show…
Practitioners often use data from a randomized controlled trial to learn a treatment assignment policy that can be deployed on a target population. A recurring concern in doing so is that, even if the randomized trial was well-executed…
Empirical welfare analyses often impose stringent parametric assumptions on individuals' preferences and neglect unobserved preference heterogeneity. We develop a framework to conduct individual and social welfare analysis for discrete…
Optimal treatment rules are mappings from individual patient characteristics to tailored treatment assignments that maximize mean outcomes. In this work, we introduce a conditional potential benefit (CPB) metric that measures the expected…
Machine learning is increasingly used to select which individuals receive limited-resource interventions in domains such as human services, education, development, and more. However, it is often not apparent what the right quantity is for…
Consider a causal structure with endogeneity (i.e., unobserved confoundedness) in empirical data, where an instrumental variable is available. In this setting, we show that the mean social welfare function can be identified and represented…
We introduce the problem of assigning resources to improve their utilization. The motivation comes from settings where agents have uncertainty about their own values for using a resource, and where it is in the interest of a group that…
The economic approach to determine optimal legal policies involves maximizing a social welfare function. We propose an alternative: a consent-approach that seeks to promote consensual interactions and deter non-consensual interactions. The…
Identifying who should be treated is a central question in economics. There are two competing approaches to targeting - paternalistic and autonomous. In the paternalistic approach, policymakers optimally target the policy given observable…