Related papers: Comparative Patience
We revisit the problem of fairly allocating a sequence of time slots when agents may have different levels of patience (Mackenzie and Komornik 2023). For each number of agents, we provide a lower threshold and an upper threshold on the…
We propose a notion of fairness for allocation problems in which different agents may have different reservation utilities, stemming from different outside options, or property rights. Fairness is usually understood as the absence of envy,…
Consider a game where Alice generates an integer and Bob wins if he can factor that integer. Traditional game theory tells us that Bob will always win this game even though in practice Alice will win given our usual assumptions about the…
We characterize decreasing impatience, a common behavioral phenomenon in intertemporal choice. Discount factors that display decreasing impatience are characterized through a convexit y axiom for investments at fixed interest rates. Then we…
In this work we generalize standard Decision Theory by assuming that two outcomes can also be incomparable. Two motivating scenarios show how incomparability may be helpful to represent those situations where, due to lack of information,…
We examine the strategic interaction between an expert (principal) maximizing engagement and an agent seeking swift information. Our analysis reveals: When priors align, relative patience determines optimal disclosure -- impatient agents…
When decision makers evaluate a sequence of rewards, they may pay more attention to larger rewards and, given attention is limited, less attention to smaller rewards. They may also become less attentive to each reward when attention is…
Winners-take-all situations introduce an incentive for agents to diversify their behavior, since doing so will result in splitting an eventual price with fewer people. At the same time, when the payoff of a process depends on a parameter…
Recent literature highlights the advantages of implementing social rules via dynamic game forms. We characterize when truth-telling remains a dominant strategy in gradual mechanisms implementing strategy-proof social rules, where agents…
This paper maps out the relation between different approaches for handling preferences in argumentation with strict rules and defeasible assumptions by offering translations between them. The systems we compare are: non-prioritized defeats…
It is well known that reinforcement learning can be cast as inference in an appropriate probabilistic model. However, this commonly involves introducing a distribution over agent trajectories with probabilities proportional to exponentiated…
The occurrence of discrimination is an important problem in the social and economical sciences. Much of the discrimination observed in empirical studies can be explained by the theory of in-group favoritism, which states that people tend to…
In finite problems comprising objects, situations, and an object- and situation-contingent payoff function, we study the comparative statics of the set of undominated objects, meaning those for which there exists no mixture over objects…
Using theory and experiments, this paper shows that the difficulty of making tradeoffs offers a parsimonious explanation for a wide range of behavioral phenomena. We develop a model of imprecise comparisons applicable to multiattribute,…
We consider a model where an agent is must choose between alternatives that each provide only an imprecise description of the world (e.g. linguistic expressions). The set of alternatives is closed under logical conjunction and disjunction,…
A striking limitation of human cognition is our inability to execute some tasks simultaneously. Recent work suggests that such limitations can arise from a fundamental tradeoff in network architectures that is driven by the sharing of…
The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk…
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…
I model a rational agent who experiences endogenous deadline pressure in the face of a fixed future deadline. The agent holds a resource stock, and opportunities to spend resources arise randomly according to a Poisson process. When the…
For three natural classes of dynamic decision problems; 1. additively separable problems, 2. discounted problems, and 3. discounted problems for a fixed discount factor; we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for one sequential…