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Content creators compete for exposure on recommendation platforms, and such strategic behavior leads to a dynamic shift over the content distribution. However, how the creators' competition impacts user welfare and how the relevance-driven…
We develop a theoretical framework to investigate the link between rising scale economies and stagnating productivity. Our model features heterogeneous firms, imperfect competition, and firm selection. We demonstrate that scale economies…
Using both single-index measures and stochastic dominance concepts, we show how Bayesian inference can be used to make multivariate welfare comparisons. A four-dimensional distribution for the well-being attributes income, mental health,…
Most social choice rules assume access to full rankings, while current alignment practice -- despite aiming for diversity -- typically treats voters as anonymous and comparisons as independent, effectively extracting only about one bit per…
Substantial empirical research has shown that the level of individualism vs. collectivism is one of the most critical and important determinants of societal traits, such as economic growth, economic institutions and health conditions. But…
Connections appear to be helpful in many contexts, such as obtaining a job, a promotion, a grant, a loan, or publishing a paper. This may be due either to favoritism or to information conveyed by connections. Attempts at identifying both…
Online platforms mediate access to opportunity: relevance-based rankings create and constrain options by allocating exposure to job openings and job candidates in hiring platforms, or sellers in a marketplace. In order to do so responsibly,…
Biological competition is widely believed to result in the evolution of selfish preferences. The related concept of the `homo economicus' is at the core of mainstream economics. However, there is also experimental and empirical evidence for…
In mainstream neoclassical economics, utility maximization is the only engine of individual action, and the other or the social, if it is modeled for decisions deemed fundamental, it is done as a tacit externality parameter affecting an…
Recommender systems are central to modern online platforms, but a popular concern is that they may be pulling society in dangerous directions (e.g., towards filter bubbles). However, a challenge with measuring the effects of recommender…
Evidence is growing that in many markets consumers select not simply on the basis of the perceived attributes of products, but their preferences are modified by the behaviour of others. Economists have paid relatively little attention to…
We study whether competition for social status induces higher effort provision and efficiency when individuals collaborate with their network neighbors. We consider a laboratory experiment in which individuals choose a costly collaborative…
In human societies, people's willingness to compete and strive for better social status as well as being envious of those perceived in some way superior lead to social structures that are intrinsically hierarchical. Here we propose an…
We study the associations between everyday economic decision-making quality and people's emotional states. Using high-frequency, highly disaggregated consumer "scanner" data, we show that the cost of poor decision-making is substantial, on…
How should we decide which fairness criteria or definitions to adopt in machine learning systems? To answer this question, we must study the fairness preferences of actual users of machine learning systems. Stringent parity constraints on…
Humans inevitably develop a sense of the relationships between objects, some of which are based on their appearance. Some pairs of objects might be seen as being alternatives to each other (such as two pairs of jeans), while others may be…
In the name of meritocracy, modern economies devote increasing amounts of resources to quantifying and ranking the performance of individuals and organisations. Rankings send out powerful signals, which lead to identify the actions of top…
The pervasive use of social media provides massive data about individuals' online social activities and their social relations. The building block of most existing recommendation systems is the similarity between users with social…
Professional networks are a key determinant of individuals' labor market outcomes. They may also play a role in either exacerbating or ameliorating inequality of opportunity across demographic groups. In a theoretical model of professional…
We study the role of imitation within a model of economics with adaptive agents. The basic ingredients are those of the Minority Game. We add the possibility of local information exchange and imitation of the neighbour's strategy. Imitators…