Related papers: Learning treatment effects while treating those in…
Treatment effect heterogeneity is of a great concern when evaluating policy impact: "is the treatment Pareto-improving?", "what is the proportion of people who are better off under the treatment?", etc. However, even in the simple case of a…
There has been a surge of recent interest in automatically learning policies to target treatment decisions based on rich individual covariates. In addition, practitioners want confidence that the learned policy has better performance than…
We consider a setting where $n$ buyers, with combinatorial preferences over $m$ items, and a seller, running a priority-based allocation mechanism, repeatedly interact. Our goal, from observing limited information about the results of these…
From social networks to supply chains, more and more aspects of how humans, firms and organizations interact is mediated by artificial learning agents. As the influence of machine learning systems grows, it is paramount that we study how to…
Reinforcement learning is commonly concerned with problems of maximizing accumulated rewards in Markov decision processes. Oftentimes, a certain goal state or a subset of the state space attain maximal reward. In such a case, the…
We are witnessing an increasing use of data-driven predictive models to inform decisions. As decisions have implications for individuals and society, there is increasing pressure on decision makers to be transparent about their decision…
The increasing impact of algorithmic decisions on people's lives compels us to scrutinize their fairness and, in particular, the disparate impacts that ostensibly-color-blind algorithms can have on different groups. Examples include credit…
We address the problem of learning to assign prediction tasks to one agent from a set of available human or AI agents. In particular, we focus on the sequential learning of agent expertise and assignment policies where each agent is…
Multiple lines of evidence suggest that predictive models may benefit from algorithmic triage. Under algorithmic triage, a predictive model does not predict all instances but instead defers some of them to human experts. However, the…
Ineffective fundraising lowers the resources charities can use to provide goods. We combine a field experiment and a causal machine-learning approach to increase a charity's fundraising effectiveness. The approach optimally targets a…
The use of machine learning to guide clinical decision making has the potential to worsen existing health disparities. Several recent works frame the problem as that of algorithmic fairness, a framework that has attracted considerable…
In recent years, automated data-driven decision-making systems have enjoyed a tremendous success in a variety of fields (e.g., to make product recommendations, or to guide the production of entertainment). More recently, these algorithms…
When studying policy interventions, researchers often pursue two goals: i) identifying for whom the program has the largest effects (heterogeneity) and ii) determining whether those patterns of treatment effects have predictive power across…
It is known that reinforcement learning (RL) is data-hungry. To improve sample-efficiency of RL, it has been proposed that the learning algorithm utilize data from 'approximately similar' processes. However, since the process models are…
This effort is focused on examining the behavior of reinforcement learning systems in personalization environments and detailing the differences in policy entropy associated with the type of learning algorithm utilized. We demonstrate that…
Conventional treatment policies map patient covariates to a single recommended intervention in order to maximize expected clinical outcomes. Although a rich body of causal inference methods has been developed to estimate such policies,…
We consider the batch (off-line) policy learning problem in the infinite horizon Markov Decision Process. Motivated by mobile health applications, we focus on learning a policy that maximizes the long-term average reward. We propose a…
User marketing is a key focus of consumer-based internet companies. Learning algorithms are effective to optimize marketing campaigns which increase user engagement, and facilitates cross-marketing to related products. By attracting users…
Undesired bias afflicts both human and algorithmic decision making, and may be especially prevalent when information processing trade-offs incentivize the use of heuristics. One primary example is \textit{statistical discrimination} --…
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly achieve expert-level predictive accuracy in healthcare, yet improvements in model performance often fail to produce corresponding gains in patient outcomes. We term this disconnect the…