Related papers: Well-being policy evaluation methodology based on …
Prediction models have been widely adopted as the basis for decision-making in domains as diverse as employment, education, lending, and health. Yet, few real world problems readily present themselves as precisely formulated prediction…
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…
Off-policy estimation (OPE) methods enable unbiased offline evaluation of recommender systems, directly estimating the online reward some target policy would have obtained, from offline data and with statistical guarantees. The theoretical…
Evaluating the causal impacts of possible interventions is crucial for informing decision-making, especially towards improving access to opportunity. However, if causal effects are heterogeneous and predictable from covariates, personalized…
Global comparisons of wellbeing increasingly rely on survey questions that ask respondents to evaluate their lives, most commonly in the form of "life satisfaction" and "Cantril ladder" items. These measures underpin international rankings…
The tension between qualitative theorizing and quantitative methods is pervasive in the social sciences, and poses a constant challenge to empirical research. But in science studies as an interdisciplinary specialty, there are additional…
Recommender systems have become the dominant means of curating cultural content, significantly influencing individual cultural experience. Since recommender systems tend to optimize for personalized user experience, they can overlook…
The problem of quantification of emotions in the choice between alternatives is considered. The alternatives are evaluated in a dual manner. From one side, they are characterized by rational features defining the utility of each…
Public opinion on environmental issues remains polarized in many countries, posing a significant barrier to the implementation of effective policies. Behind this polarization, empirical studies have identified social susceptibility,…
The use of science for policy is at the core of a perfect storm generated by the insurgence of several concurrent crises: of science, of trust, of sustainability. The modern positivistic model of science for policy, known as evidence based…
Well-being is a relatively broad concept which can be succinctly described as the state of being happy, healthy or successful. Interesting things happen when bridging user interface design with the psychology of human well-being. This…
The modeling of complex systems such as ecological or socio-economic systems can be very challenging. Although various modeling approaches exist, they are generally not compatible and mutually consistent, and empirical data often do not…
Over the past few decades, statistical methods for causal inference have made impressive strides, enabling progress across a range of scientific fields. However, much of this methodological development has been confined to individual…
In search engines, online marketplaces and other human-computer interfaces large collectives of individuals sequentially interact with numerous alternatives of varying quality. In these contexts, trial and error (exploration) is crucial for…
How should one combine noisy information from diverse sources to make an inference about an objective ground truth? This frequently recurring, normative question lies at the core of statistics, machine learning, policy-making, and everyday…
Mathematical models are increasing adopted for setting targets for disease prevention and control. As model-informed policies are implemented, however, the inaccuracies of some forecasts become apparent, for example overprediction of…
In classic reinforcement learning (RL) and decision making problems, policies are evaluated with respect to a scalar reward function, and all optimal policies are the same with regards to their expected return. However, many real-world…
Insights are relative - influenced by a range of factors such as assumptions, scopes, or methods that together define a research perspective. In normative and empirical fields alike, this insight has led to the conclusion that no single…
The study of fairness in intelligent decision systems has mostly ignored long-term influence on the underlying population. Yet fairness considerations (e.g. affirmative action) have often the implicit goal of achieving balance among groups…
Pedestrian well-being is a critical yet rarely measured component of sustainable urban mobility and livable city design. Existing approaches to evaluating pedestrian environments often rely on static, infrastructure-based indices or…