Related papers: Identification and Inference for Welfare Gains wit…
Quantifying the impact of regulatory policies on social welfare generally requires the identification of counterfactual distributions. Many of these policies (e.g. minimum wages or minimum working time) generate mass points and/or…
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…
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…
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
This paper develops theoretical criteria and econometric methods to rank policy interventions in terms of welfare when individuals are loss-averse. Our new criterion for "loss aversion-sensitive dominance" defines a weak partial ordering of…
This paper develops a robust and efficient method for policy learning from observational data in the presence of unobserved confounding, complementing existing instrumental variable (IV) based approaches. We employ the marginal sensitivity…
Off-policy evaluation of sequential decision policies from observational data is necessary in applications of batch reinforcement learning such as education and healthcare. In such settings, however, unobserved variables confound observed…
Empirical Welfare Maximization (EWM) is a framework that can be used to select welfare program eligibility policies based on data. This paper extends EWM by allowing for uncertainty in estimating the budget needed to implement the selected…
This paper introduces a rule for policy selection in the presence of estimation uncertainty, explicitly accounting for estimation risk. The rule belongs to the class of risk-aware rules on the efficient decision frontier, characterized as…
We draw attention to an important, yet largely overlooked aspect of evaluating fairness for automated decision making systems---namely risk and welfare considerations. Our proposed family of measures corresponds to the long-established…
This paper studies policy learning for continuous treatments from observational data. Continuous treatments present more significant challenges than discrete ones because population welfare may need nonparametric estimation, and policy…
Empirical research shows that individuals' responses to treatments vary along latent characteristics, such as innate ability or motivation. Therefore, a policymaker seeking to maximize welfare may consider designing policies based on…
Many real-life settings of consumer-choice involve social interactions, causing targeted policies to have spillover-effects. This paper develops novel empirical tools for analyzing demand and welfare-effects of policy-interventions in…
Motivated by applications such as college admission and insurance rate determination, we propose an evaluation problem where the inputs are controlled by strategic individuals who can modify their features at a cost. A learner can only…
Neuroeconomics promises to ground welfare analysis in neural and computational evidence about how people value outcomes, learn from experience and exercise self-control. At the same time, policy and commercial actors increasingly invoke…
The relationship of policy choice by majority voting and by maximization of utilitarian welfare has long been discussed. I consider choice between a status quo and a proposed policy when persons have interpersonally comparable cardinal…
Current methodologies in machine learning analyze the effects of various statistical parity notions of fairness primarily in light of their impacts on predictive accuracy and vendor utility loss. In this paper, we propose a new framework…
To choose between two discrete goods, a consumer pays attention to only those with prices below a threshold. From these, she chooses her most preferred good. We assume consumers in a population have the same preference but may have…
We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred.…
When inferring the causal effect of one variable on another from correlational data, a common practice by professional researchers as well as lay decision makers is to control for some set of exogenous confounding variables. Choosing an…