Related papers: Efficiency in Random Resource Allocation and Socia…
Motivated by the success of the serial dictatorship mechanism in social choice settings, we explore its usefulness in tackling various combinatorial optimization problems. We do so by considering an abstract model, in which a set of agents…
In social choice settings with linear preferences, random dictatorship is known to be the only social decision scheme satisfying strategyproofness and ex post efficiency. When also allowing indifferences, random serial dictatorship (RSD) is…
In social choice theory, (Kemeny) rank aggregation is a well-studied problem where the goal is to combine rankings from multiple voters into a single ranking on the same set of items. Since rankings can reveal preferences of voters (which a…
Preferences play a key role in determining what goals/constraints to satisfy when not all constraints can be satisfied simultaneously. In this work, we study preference-based planning in a stochastic system modeled as a Markov decision…
Given a set of $n$ individuals with strict preferences over $m$ indivisible objects, the Random Serial Dictatorship (RSD) mechanism is a method for allocating objects to individuals in a way that is efficient, fair, and…
Human behavioural patterns exhibit selfish or competitive, as well as selfless or altruistic tendencies, both of which have demonstrable effects on human social and economic activity. In behavioural economics, such effects have…
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…
Dynamic decisions are pivotal to economic policy making. We show how existing evidence from randomized control trials can be utilized to guide personalized decisions in challenging dynamic environments with budget and capacity constraints.…
We study a sequential resource allocation problem involving a fixed number of recurring jobs. At each time-step the manager should distribute available resources among the jobs in order to maximise the expected number of completed jobs.…
This paper considers an opportunistic scheduling problem over a renewal system. A controller observes a random event at the beginning of each renewal frame and then chooses an action in response to the event, which affects the duration of…
One-sided matching mechanisms are fundamental for assigning a set of indivisible objects to a set of self-interested agents when monetary transfers are not allowed. Two widely-studied randomized mechanisms in multiagent settings are the…
This paper establishes non-asymptotic convergence of the cutoffs in Random serial dictatorship in an environment with many students, many schools, and arbitrary student preferences. Convergence is shown to hold when the number of schools,…
In many applications such as rationing medical care and supplies, university admissions, and the assignment of public housing, the decision of who receives an allocation can be justified by various normative criteria. Such settings have…
Reinforcement learning can greatly benefit from the use of options as a way of encoding recurring behaviours and to foster exploration. An important open problem is how can an agent autonomously learn useful options when solving particular…
When trying to solve a computational problem, we are often faced with a choice between algorithms that are guaranteed to return the right answer but differ in their runtime distributions (e.g., SAT solvers, sorting algorithms). This paper…
Reallocating resources to get mutually beneficial outcomes is a fundamental problem in various multi-agent settings. While finding an arbitrary Pareto optimal allocation is generally easy, checking whether a particular allocation is Pareto…
We study preferences estimated from finite choice experiments and provide sufficient conditions for convergence to a unique underlying "true" preference. Our conditions are weak, and therefore valid in a wide range of economic environments.…
We study mechanism design problems in the {\em ordinal setting} wherein the preferences of agents are described by orderings over outcomes, as opposed to specific numerical values associated with them. This setting is relevant when agents…
We study the trade-offs between strategyproofness and other desiderata, such as efficiency or fairness, that often arise in the design of random ordinal mechanisms. We use approximate strategyproofness to define manipulability, a measure to…
We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among agents with additive valuations. When randomization is allowed, it is possible to achieve compelling notions of fairness such as envy-freeness, which states that no agent should…