Related papers: Utilitarianism on the front lines: COVID-19, publi…
An individually costly act that benefits all group members is a public good. Natural selection favors individual contribution to public goods only when some benefit to the individual offsets the cost of contribution. Problems of sex ratio,…
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…
Models of economic decision makers often include idealized assumptions, such as rationality, perfect foresight, and access to all relevant pieces of information. These assumptions often assure the models' internal validity, but, at the same…
Altruistic lobbying is lobbying in the public interest or in the interest of the least protected part of the society. In fact, an altruist has a wide range of strategies, from behaving in the interest of the society as a whole to the…
Many collective decision-making settings feature a strategic tension between agents acting out of individual self-interest and promoting a common good. These include wearing face masks during a pandemic, voting, and vaccination. Networked…
A policymaker discloses public information to interacting agents who also acquire costly private information. More precise public information reduces the precision and cost of acquired private information. Considering this effect, what…
Most ethical work is done at a low level of formality. This makes practical moral questions inaccessible to formal and natural sciences and can lead to misunderstandings in ethical discussion. In this paper, we use Bayesian inference to…
The hidden-action model captures a fundamental problem of principal-agent theory and provides an optimal sharing rule when only the outcome but not the effort can be observed. However, the hidden-action model builds on various explicit and…
Social dilemmas are situations in which collective interests are at odds with private interests: pollution, depletion of natural resources, and intergroup conflicts, are at their core social dilemmas. Because of their multidisciplinarity…
Simulation models have been informing the COVID-19 policy-making process. These models, therefore, have significant influence on risk of societal harms. But how clearly are the underlying modelling assumptions and limitations communicated…
Managers regularly face a complex ethical dilemma over how to best govern online communities by evaluating the effectiveness of different social or technical strategies. What ethical considerations should guide researchers and managers when…
Public sector agencies perform the critical task of implementing the redistributive role of the State by acting as the leading provider of critical public services that many rely on. In recent years, public agencies have been increasingly…
The ongoing debate on the ethics of self-driving cars typically focuses on two approaches to answering ethical questions: moral philosophy and social science. I argue that these two approaches are both lacking. We should neither deduce…
Many policies allocate harms or benefits that are uncertain in nature: they produce distributions over the population in which individuals have different probabilities of incurring harm or benefit. Comparing different policies thus involves…
While there is universal agreement that agents ought to act ethically, there is no agreement as to what constitutes ethical behaviour. To address this problem, recent philosophical approaches to `moral uncertainty' propose aggregation of…
This paper examines optimal risk sharing for empirically realistic risk attitudes, providing results on Pareto optimality, competitive equilibria, utility frontiers, and the first and second theorems of welfare. Contrary to common…
When we use machine learning for public policy, we find that many useful variables are associated with others on which it would be ethically problematic to base decisions. This problem becomes particularly acute in the Big Data era, when…
Controversy about the significance of underdetermination of theories persists in the philosophy and conduct of science. The issue has practical import when research is used to inform decision making, because scientific uncertainty yields…
Optimization is offered as an objective approach to resolving complex, real-world decisions involving uncertainty and conflicting interests. It drives business strategies as well as public policies and, increasingly, lies at the heart of…
Welfare economics relies on access to agents' utility functions: we revisit classical questions in welfare economics, assuming access to data on agents' past choices instead of their utilities. Our main result considers the existence of…