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We study how increasing competition, by making prizes more unequal, affects effort in contests. In a finite type-space environment, we characterize the equilibrium, analyze the effect of competition under linear costs, and identify…
This thesis considers sequential decision problems, where the loss/reward incurred by selecting an action may not be inferred from observed feedback. A major part of this thesis focuses on the unsupervised sequential selection problem,…
Algorithmic fairness in decision-making has been studied extensively in static settings where one-shot decisions are made on tasks such as classification. However, in practice most decision-making processes are of a sequential nature, where…
An agent's preferences depend on an ordered parameter or type. We characterize the set of utility functions with single-crossing differences (SCD) in convex environments. These include preferences over lotteries, both in expected utility…
We consider the problem of sequential evaluation, in which an evaluator observes candidates in a sequence and assigns scores to these candidates in an online, irrevocable fashion. Motivated by the psychology literature that has studied…
Blockchains have a two-sided reputation: they are praised for disrupting some of our institutions through innovative technology for good, yet notorious for being slow and expensive to use. In this work, we tackle this issue with…
A growing class of applications depends on fair ordering, where events that occur earlier should be processed before later ones. Providing such guarantees is difficult in practice because clock synchronization is inherently imperfect:…
A common assumption in causal modeling posits that the data is generated by a set of independent mechanisms, and algorithms should aim to recover this structure. Standard unsupervised learning, however, is often concerned with training a…
Two firms are engaged in a competitive prediction task. Each firm has two sources of data -- labeled historical data and unlabeled inference-time data -- and uses the former to derive a prediction model, and the latter to make predictions…
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown remarkable performance on challenging questions, such as math and coding. However, to obtain a high quality solution, one may need to sample more than once. In principal, there are two sampling…
Feature selection is the problem of selecting a subset of features for a machine learning model that maximizes model quality subject to a budget constraint. For neural networks, prior methods, including those based on $\ell_1$…
Auction is applied for trade with various mechanisms. A simple but practical question is which mechanism, typically first-price or second-price auctions, is preferred from the perspective of bidders or sellers. A celebrated answer is…
This thesis considers sequential decision problems, where the loss/reward incurred by selecting an action may not be inferred from observed feedback. A major part of this thesis focuses on the unsupervised sequential selection problem,…
We analyze a two-period, two-market chain-store game in which an incumbent's conduct in one market is only sometimes seen in the other. This partial observability generates reputational spillovers across markets. We characterize equilibrium…
This paper presents different methods for solving parallel machine scheduling problems with precedence constraints and setup times between the jobs. Limited discrepancy search methods mixed with local search principles, dominance conditions…
Fair division is typically framed from a centralized perspective. However, in practice resource allocation often occurs via decentralized networks. We study a decentralized variant of fair division inspired by altruistic dynamics observed…
Prior work on the complexity of bribery assumes that the bribery happens simultaneously, and that the briber has full knowledge of all voters' votes. But neither of those assumptions always holds. In many real-world settings, votes come in…
We consider a single buyer with a combinatorial preference that would like to purchase related products and services from different vendors, where each vendor supplies exactly one product. We study the general case where subsets of products…
Bounding the price of anarchy, which quantifies the damage to social welfare due to selfish behavior of the participants, has been an important area of research. In this paper, we study this phenomenon in the context of a game modeling…
This paper presents the Sequential Rationality Hypothesis, which argues that consumers are better able to make utility-maximizing decisions when products appear in sequential pairwise comparisons rather than in simultaneous multi-option…