Related papers: Incontestable Assignments
We consider the allocation of indivisible objects when agents have preferences over their own allocations, but share the ownership of the resources to be distributed. Examples might include seats in public schools, faculty offices, and time…
We evaluate the goal of maximizing the number of individuals matched to acceptable outcomes. We show that it implies incentive, fairness, and implementation impossibilities. Despite that, we present two classes of mechanisms that maximize…
The Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism can generate inefficient placements. Although Pareto-dominant mechanisms exist, it remains unclear which and how many students could improve. We characterize the set of unimprovable students and show…
Using school choice as a motivating example, we introduce a stylized model of a many-to-one matching market where the clearinghouse aims to implement contingent priorities, i.e., priorities that depend on the current assignment, to…
In the assignment problem, a set of items must be allocated to unit-demand agents who express ordinal preferences (rankings) over the items. In the assignment problem with priorities, agents with higher priority are entitled to their…
We investigate the problem of random assignment of indivisible goods, in which each agent has an ordinal preference and a constraint. Our goal is to characterize the conditions under which there always exists a random assignment that…
Consider a university assigning students to courses and dorms. While many mechanisms are available, they each have their own drawbacks. Running serial dictatorship once for all goods is highly unfair, but running serial dictatorship…
We consider active learning under incentive compatibility constraints. The main application of our results is to economic experiments, in which a learner seeks to infer the parameters of a subject's preferences: for example their attitudes…
We consider two-sided matching markets, and study the incentives of agents to circumvent a centralized clearing house by signing binding contracts with one another. It is well-known that if the clearing house implements a stable match and…
Evidence suggests that participants in strategy-proof matching mechanisms play dominated strategies. To explain the data, we introduce expectation-based loss aversion into a school-choice setting and characterize choice-acclimating personal…
In fair division of indivisible goods, using sequences of sincere choices (or picking sequences) is a natural way to allocate the objects. The idea is the following: at each stage, a designated agent picks one object among those that…
Individual choices often depend on the order in which the decisions are made. In this paper, we expose a general theory of measurable systems (an example of which is an individual's preferences) allowing for incompatible (non-commuting)…
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 repeated task assignment as an instrument for providing effort incentives. Unlike traditional incentive instruments, assignment of a task both determines who produces and provides incentives, and incentives for one worker spill…
The intransitive cycle of superiority is characterized by such binary relations between A, B, and C that A is superior to B, B is superior to C, and C is superior to A (i.e., A>B>C>A - in contrast with transitive relations A>B>C). The first…
Contrastive learning is a popular form of self-supervised learning that encourages augmentations (views) of the same input to have more similar representations compared to augmentations of different inputs. Recent attempts to theoretically…
Machine learning researchers and practitioners steadily enlarge the multitude of successful learning models. They achieve this through in-depth theoretical analyses and experiential heuristics. However, there is no known general-purpose…
We consider the challenge of finding a deterministic policy for a Markov decision process that uniformly (in all states) maximizes one reward subject to a probabilistic constraint over a different reward. Existing solutions do not fully…
We consider the problem of allocating indivisible objects to agents when agents have strict preferences over objects. There are inherent trade-offs between competing notions of efficiency, fairness and incentives in assignment mechanisms.…
The problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible items is a well-known challenge in the field of (computational) social choice. In this scenario, there is a fundamental incompatibility between notions of fairness (such as envy-freeness…