Related papers: Inequality of Opportunity and Income Redistributio…
Why are some events more surprising than others? We propose that events that are more difficult to explain are those that are more surprising. The two experiments reported here test the impact of different event outcomes (Outcome-Type) and…
Our societies are heterogeneous in many dimensions such as census, education, religion, ethnic and cultural composition. The links between individuals - e.g. by friendship, marriage or collaboration - are not evenly distributed, but rather…
Most decision theories, including expected utility theory, rank dependent utility theory and cumulative prospect theory, assume that investors are only interested in the distribution of returns and not in the states of the economy in which…
Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…
Evolution of cooperation is a widely studied problem in biology, social science, economics, and artificial intelligence. Most of the existing approaches that explain cooperation rely on some notion of direct or indirect reciprocity. These…
Income inequality is a distributional phenomenon. This paper examines the impact of U.S governor's party allegiance (Republican vs Democrat) on ethnic wage gap. A descriptive analysis of the distribution of yearly earnings of Whites and…
We consider social resource allocations that deliver an array of scarce supports to a diverse population. Such allocations pervade social service delivery, such as provision of homeless services, assignment of refugees to cities, among…
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…
The underlying idea behind the construction of indices of economic inequality is based on measuring deviations of various portions of low incomes from certain references or benchmarks, that could be point measures like population mean or…
Machine Learning (ML) decision-making algorithms are now widely used in predictive decision-making, for example, to determine who to admit and give a loan. Their wide usage and consequential effects on individuals led the ML community to…
Why are human societies unstable? Theories based on the observation of recurring patterns in historical data indicate that economic inequality, as well as social factors are key drivers. So far, models of this phenomenon are more…
Tournaments are frequently used incentive mechanisms to enhance performance. In this paper, we use field data and show that skill disparities among contestants asymmetrically affect the performance of contestants. Skill disparities have…
Microscopic models describing a whole of economic interactions in a closed society are considered. The presence of a tax system combined with a redistribution process is taken into account, as well as the occurrence of tax evasion. In…
We study the interplay of information and prior (mis)perceptions in a Phelps-Aigner-Cain-type model of statistical discrimination in the labor market. We decompose the effect on average pay of an increase in how informative observables are…
We describe a formal approach based on graphical causal models to identify the "root causes" of the change in the probability distribution of variables. After factorizing the joint distribution into conditional distributions of each…
We study group fairness in the context of feedback loops induced by meritocratic selection into programs that themselves confer additional advantage, like college admissions. We introduce a stylized, yet novel inter-generational model for…
As society transitions towards an AI-based decision-making infrastructure, an ever-increasing number of decisions once under control of humans are now delegated to automated systems. Even though such developments make various parts of…
In many competitive settings, from education to politics, rules do not reward effort evenly, and thresholds (e.g., grade cutoffs or electoral majorities) make some moments disproportionately important. Success thus depends on efficiently…
This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic backgrounds, show…
Social scientists have long sought to understand why certain people, items, or options become more popular than others. One seemingly intuitive theory is that inherent value drives popularity. An alternative theory claims that popularity is…