Related papers: An Axiomatic Framework for Cost-Benefit Analysis
Economists often estimate causal effects of policies on multiple outcomes and summarize them into scalar measures of cost-effectiveness or welfare, such as the Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF). In many settings, microdata underlying…
This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of welfare measures when oligopolistic firms face multiple policy interventions and external changes under general forms of market demands, production costs, and imperfect competition. We present…
Decision making in the public sector centers on delivering resources and services for the common good, emphasizing an expansive set of objectives such as equity and efficiency, beyond immediate short term returns to reflect the broader…
In this work, we propose an axiomatic approach for measuring the performance/welfare of a system consisting of concurrent agents in a resource-driven system. Our approach provides a unifying view on popular system optimality principles,…
Mechanism design in resource allocation studies dividing limited resources among self-interested agents whose satisfaction with the allocation depends on privately held utilities. We consider the problem in a payment-free setting, with the…
We study the power of item-pricing as a tool for approximately optimizing social welfare in a combinatorial market. We consider markets with $m$ indivisible items and $n$ buyers. The goal is to set prices to the items so that, when agents…
This study investigates the mean-variance (MV) trade-off in reinforcement learning (RL), an instance of the sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Our objective is to obtain MV-efficient policies whose means and variances are located…
Envy-freeness up to any good (EFX) is a central fairness notion for allocating indivisible goods, yet its existence is unresolved in general. In the setting with few surplus items, where the number of goods exceeds the number of agents by a…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a voting paradigm for distributing a divisible resource, usually called a budget, among a set of projects by aggregating the preferences of individuals over these projects. It is implemented quite extensively…
For the fundamental problem of allocating a set of resources among individuals with varied preferences, the quality of an allocation relates to the degree of fairness and the collective welfare achieved. Unfortunately, in many…
In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), deployed policies have varied impacts on different stakeholders, creating challenges in reaching consensus on how to effectively aggregate their preferences. Generalized…
We address an inherent difficulty in welfare-theoretic fair machine learning by proposing an equivalently axiomatically-justified alternative and studying the resulting computational and statistical learning questions. Welfare metrics…
A major problem in fair division is how to allocate a set of indivisible resources among agents fairly and efficiently. The goal of this work is to characterize the tradeoffs between two well-studied measures of fairness and efficiency --…
We propose a conceptual framework for counterfactual and welfare analysis for approximate models. Our key assumption is that model approximation error is the same magnitude at new choices as the observed data. Applying the framework to…
Counterfactual utilities evaluate decisions not only by the realized outcome under a given decision, but also by the counterfactual outcomes that would arise under alternative decisions. By generalizing standard utility frameworks, they…
Multilateral index numbers are often used to make claims about welfare, such as treating PPPs as cross-country costs of living or real incomes as indicators of living standards. However, such interpretations may not be consistent with the…
General value functions (GVFs) in the reinforcement learning (RL) literature are long-term predictive summaries of the outcomes of agents following specific policies in the environment. Affordances as perceived action possibilities with…
Fair allocation of indivisible goods studies allocating $m$ goods among $n$ agents in a fair manner. While fairness is a fundamental requirement in many real-world applications, it often conflicts with (economic) efficiency. This raises a…
We study proportional representation in the temporal voting model, where collective decisions are made repeatedly over time over a fixed horizon. Prior work has extensively investigated how proportional representation axioms from…
Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) provide an efficient way to model real-world sequential decision making processes. Motivated by the problem of maintenance and inspection of a group of infrastructure components with…