Related papers: Incentive-Theoretic Bayesian Inference for Collabo…
Is there a canonical way to think of agency beyond reward maximisation? In this paper, we show that any type of behaviour complying with physically sound assumptions about how macroscopic biological agents interact with the world…
Participation incentives is a well-known issue inhibiting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in medicine, as well as a potential cause of user dissatisfaction for RCTs in online platforms. We frame this issue as a non-standard…
Persuasion studies how an informed principal may influence the behavior of agents by the strategic provision of payoff-relevant information. We focus on the fundamental multi-receiver model by Arieli and Babichenko (2019), in which there…
I study the optimal design of ratings to motivate agent investment in quality when transfers are unavailable. The principal designs a rating scheme that maps the agent's quality to a (possibly stochastic) score. The agent has private…
Imitation is a key component of human social behavior, and is widely used by both children and adults as a way to navigate uncertain or unfamiliar situations. But in an environment populated by multiple heterogeneous agents pursuing…
Reward schemes may affect not only agents' effort, but also their incentives to gather information to reduce the riskiness of the productive activity. In a laboratory experiment using a novel task, we find that the relationship between…
We study the utility of social learning in a distributed detection model with agents sharing the same goal: a collective decision that optimizes an agreed upon criterion. We show that social learning is helpful in some cases but is provably…
The measurement of the efficiency of an event selection is always an important part of the analysis of experimental data. The statistical techniques which are needed to determine the efficiency and its uncertainty are reviewed. Frequentist…
Many biological, psychological and economic experiments have been designed where an organism or individual must choose between two options that have the same expected reward but differ in the variance of reward received. In this way,…
We consider testing whether a set of Gaussian variables, selected from the data, is independent of the remaining variables. We assume that this set is selected via a very simple approach that is commonly used across scientific disciplines:…
We propose a funding scheme for theoretical research that does not rely on project proposals, but on recent past scientific productivity. Given a quantitative figure of merit on the latter and the total research budget, we introduce a…
Different agents need to make a prediction. They observe identical data, but have different models: they predict using different explanatory variables. We study which agent believes they have the best predictive ability -- as measured by…
Conjoint experiments have become central to survey research in political science and related fields because they allow researchers to study preferences across multiple attributes simultaneously. Beyond estimating main effects, scholars…
Experimental and observational studies often lead to spurious association between the outcome and independent variables describing the intervention, because of confounding to third-party factors. Even in randomized clinical trials,…
Both conventional wisdom and empirical evidence suggests that arranging a prior commitment or agreement before an interaction enhances the chance of reaching mutual cooperation. Yet it is not clear what mechanisms can promote the…
Statistics is sometimes described as the science of reasoning under uncertainty. Statistical models provide one view of this uncertainty, but what is frequently neglected is the 'invisible' portion of uncertainty: that assumed not to exist…
A sender persuades a strategically naive decisionmaker (DM) by committing privately to an experiment. Sender's choice of experiment is unknown to the DM, who must form her posterior beliefs nonparametrically by applying some learning rule…
Across the empirical sciences, few statistical procedures rival the popularity of the frequentist t-test. In contrast, the Bayesian versions of the t-test have languished in obscurity. In recent years, however, the theoretical and practical…
In the past two decades, psychological science has experienced an unprecedented replicability crisis which uncovered several issues. Among others, statistical inference is too often viewed as an isolated procedure limited to the analysis of…
Modeling social interactions based on individual behavior has always been an area of interest, but prior literature generally presumes rational behavior. Thus, such models may miss out on capturing the effects of biases humans are…