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As modern social networks allow for faster and broader interactions with friends and acquaintances, online referral programs that promote sales through existing users are becoming increasingly popular. Because it is all too common that…
In most social choice settings, the participating agents express their preferences over the different alternatives in the form of linear orderings. While this clearly simplifies preference elicitation, it inevitably leads to poor…
There has been a flurry of research in recent years on notions of fairness in ranking and recommender systems, particularly on how to evaluate if a recommender allocates exposure equally across groups of relevant items (also known as…
This paper adapts ideas from social identity theory to set out a new framework for modelling conspicuous consumption. Agents derive utility from their consumption of a status good and from belonging to an identity group with high status…
The very notion of social network implies that linked individuals interact repeatedly with each other. This allows them not only to learn successful strategies and adapt to them, but also to condition their own behavior on the behavior of…
Ranking functions that are used in decision systems often produce disparate results for different populations because of bias in the underlying data. Addressing, and compensating for, these disparate outcomes is a critical problem for fair…
Understanding the forces governing human behavior and social dynamics is a challenging problem. Individuals' decisions and actions are affected by interlaced factors, such as physical location, homophily, and social ties. In this paper, we…
Large-scale social networks are thought to contribute to polarization by amplifying people's biases. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to identify the mechanisms responsible and to evaluate mitigation…
In consumer search, there is a set of items. An agent has a prior over her value for each item and can pay a cost to learn the instantiation of her value. After exploring a subset of items, the agent chooses one and obtains a payoff equal…
This paper presents a semi-quantitative mathematical model of the changes over time in the statistical distribution of well-being of individuals in a society. The model predicts that when individuals overvalue the more socially conspicuous…
Most existing notions of algorithmic fairness are one-shot: they ensure some form of allocative equality at the time of decision making, but do not account for the adverse impact of the algorithmic decisions today on the long-term welfare…
Voting online with explicit ratings could largely reflect people's preferences and objects' qualities, but ratings are always irrational, because they may be affected by many unpredictable factors like mood, weather, as well as other…
We study the consumption behaviour of an asymmetric network of heterogeneous agents in the framework of discrete choice models with stochastic decision rules. We assume that the interactions among agents are uniquely specified by their…
The prevalence of online social network makes it compulsory to study how social relations affect user choice. However, most existing methods leverage only first-order social relations, that is, the direct neighbors that are connected to the…
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have made them a popular information-seeking tool among end users. However, the statistical training methods for LLMs have raised concerns about their representation of under-represented…
This paper investigates the barriers to gender convergence using Japan as a salient environment to explore the interactive effects of labor market structures and social norms. I develop a quantitative model of household labor supply where…
Ranking, recommendation, and retrieval systems are widely used in online platforms and other societal systems, including e-commerce, media-streaming, admissions, gig platforms, and hiring. In the recent past, a large "fair ranking" research…
Recommender systems (RS) mediate human experience online. Most RS act to optimize metrics that are imperfectly aligned with the best-interest of users but are easy to measure, like ad-clicks and user engagement. This has resulted in a host…
We develop new robust discrete choice tools to learn about the average willingness to pay for a price subsidy and its effects on demand given exogenous, discrete variation in prices. Our starting point is a nonparametric, nonseparable model…
Gender norms are widely recognized as key determinants of persistent gender gaps in the labor market. However, our understanding of the drivers of gender norms, and their implications for preferences, remain lacking. This paper addresses…