Related papers: Social Preferences and Deliberately Stochastic Beh…
Meritocratic systems, from admissions to hiring, aim to impartially reward skill and effort. Yet persistent disparities across race, gender, and class challenge this ideal. Some attribute these gaps to structural inequality; others to…
Although behavioral economics has demonstrated that there are many situations where rational choice is a poor empirical model, it has so far failed to provide quantitative models of economic problems such as price formation. We make a step…
In order to truly understand how social media might shape online discourses or contribute to societal polarization, we need refined models of platform choice, that is: models that help us understand why users prefer one social media…
In this paper, we study stochastic coupon probing problem in social networks. Assume there is a social network and a set of coupons. We can offer coupons to some users adaptively and those users who accept the offer will act as seeds and…
In this paper, we propose a propensity score adapted variable selection procedure to select covariates for inclusion in propensity score models, in order to eliminate confounding bias and improve statistical efficiency in observational…
Economies and societal structures in general are complex stochastic systems which may not lend themselves well to algebraic analysis. An addition of subjective value criteria to the mechanics of interacting agents will further complicate…
This paper considers utility indifference valuation of derivatives under model uncertainty and trading constraints, where the utility is formulated as an additive stochastic differential utility of both intertemporal consumption and…
We show that it is possible to understand and identify a decision maker's subjective causal judgements by observing her preferences over interventions. Following Pearl [2000], we represent causality using causal models (also called…
There is a large amount of interest in understanding users of social media in order to predict their behavior in this space. Despite this interest, user predictability in social media is not well-understood. To examine this question, we…
Aggregated phenomena in social sciences and economics are highly dependent on the way individuals interact. To help understanding the interplay between socio-economic activities and underlying social networks, this paper studies a…
Supervised learning models have been increasingly used for making decisions about individuals in applications such as hiring, lending, and college admission. These models may inherit pre-existing biases from training datasets and…
In a survey disclosure model, we consider an additive noise privacy mechanism and study the trade-off between privacy guarantees and statistical utility. Privacy is approached from two different but complementary viewpoints: information and…
The Merton investment-consumption problem is fundamental, both in the field of finance, and in stochastic control. An important extension of the problem adds transaction costs, which is highly relevant from a financial perspective but also…
We investigate how individuals form expectations about population behavior using statistical inference based on observations of their social relations. Misperceptions about others' connectedness and behavior arise from sampling bias…
A recently proposed model of social interaction in voting is investigated by simplifying it down into a version that is more analytically tractable and which allows a mathematical analysis to be performed. This analysis clarifies the…
Recent work has constructed economic mechanisms that are both truthful and differentially private. In these mechanisms, privacy is treated separately from the truthfulness; it is not incorporated in players' utility functions (and doing so…
Idiosyncratic tendency to choose one alternative over others in the absence of an identified reason, is a common observation in two-alternative forced-choice experiments. It is tempting to account for it as resulting from the (unknown)…
Causal inference methods (instrumental variables, difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, etc.) are primary tools used across many social science milieus. One area where their application has lagged however, is in the study of…
Despite the prevalence of voting systems in the real world there is no consensus among researchers of how people vote strategically, even in simple voting settings. This paper addresses this gap by comparing different approaches that have…
Real-world engineering systems are typically compared and contrasted using multiple metrics. For practical machine learning systems, performance tuning is often more nuanced than minimizing a single expected loss objective, and it may be…