Related papers: Playing the system: address manipulation and acces…
This study considers a model where schools may have multiple priority orders on students, which may be inconsistent with each other. For example, in school choice systems, since the sibling priority and the walk zone priority coexist, the…
We study the susceptibility of committee governance (e.g. by boards of directors), modelled as the collective determination of a ranking of a set of alternatives, to manipulation of the order in which pairs of alternatives are voted on --…
In a typical school choice application, the students have strict preferences over the schools while the schools have coarse priorities over the students based on their distance and their enrolled siblings. The outcome of a centralized…
Problem definition: Traditionally, New York City's top 8 public schools have selected candidates solely based on their scores in the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). These scores are known to be impacted by socioeconomic…
We study how to optimally design selection mechanisms, accounting for agents' investment incentives. A principal wishes to allocate a resource of homogeneous quality to a heterogeneous population of agents. The principal commits to a…
We examine the possible consequences of a change in law school admissions in the United States from an affirmative action system based on race to one based on socioeconomic class. Using data from the 1991-1996 Law School Admission Council…
Participants in socio-economic systems are often ranked based on their performance. Rankings conveniently reduce the complexity of such systems to ordered lists. Yet, it has been shown in many contexts that those who reach the top are not…
This paper shows that the timing of monetary transfers to low-income families affects students' cognitive performance on high-stakes standardized tests. We combine administrative records from the world's largest conditional cash transfer…
We study the behaviour of a Schelling-class system in which a fraction $f$ of spatially-fixed switching agents is introduced. This new model allows for multiple interpretations, including: (i) random, non-preferential allocation…
Automated decision-making tools increasingly assess individuals to determine if they qualify for high-stakes opportunities. A recent line of research investigates how strategic agents may respond to such scoring tools to receive favorable…
Consequential decision-making incentivizes individuals to strategically adapt their behavior to the specifics of the decision rule. While a long line of work has viewed strategic adaptation as gaming and attempted to mitigate its effects,…
Online information ecosystems are now central to our everyday social interactions. Of the many opportunities and challenges this presents, the capacity for artificial agents to shape individual and collective human decision-making in such…
The group identification problem asks to identify a socially qualified subgroup among a group of individuals based on their pairwise valuations. There are several different rules that can be used to determine the social qualification…
Judicial promotions shape the composition of higher courts, yet their determinants remain poorly understood. This paper examines promotion from U.S. District Courts to Courts of Appeals using a discrete-time hazard framework that models…
I investigate how political incentives affect the behavior of district attorneys (DAs). I develop a theoretical model that predicts DAs will increase sentencing intensity in an election period compared to the period prior. To empirically…
We study the problem of screening in decision-making processes under uncertainty, focusing on the impact of adding an additional screening stage, commonly known as a 'gatekeeper.' While our primary analysis is rooted in the context of job…
It is important to study how strategic agents can affect the outcome of an election. There has been a long line of research in the computational study of elections on the complexity of manipulative actions such as manipulation and bribery.…
In real-world settings of the Deferred Acceptance stable matching algorithm, such as the American medical residency match (NRMP), school choice programs, and various national university entrance systems, candidates need to decide which…
To better understand discriminations and the effect of affirmative actions in selection problems (e.g., college admission or hiring), a recent line of research proposed a model based on differential variance. This model assumes that the…
Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning agents can develop policies that exploit spurious correlations between rewards and observations. This phenomenon, known as policy confounding, arises because the agent's policy influences…