Related papers: Temptation: Immediacy and certainty
Predictive models are often introduced to decision-making tasks under the rationale that they improve performance over an existing decision-making policy. However, it is challenging to compare predictive performance against an existing…
This paper investigates a novel behavioral feature of recursive preferences: aversion to risks that persist over time, or simply \textit{correlation aversion}. Greater persistence provides information about future consumption but reduces…
According to recent results, convergence in a prespecified or prescribed finite time can be achieved under extreme model uncertainty if control is applied continuously over time. This paper shows that this extreme amount of uncertainty…
Real-time inference is a challenge of real-world reinforcement learning due to temporal differences in time-varying environments: the system collects data from the past, updates the decision model in the present, and deploys it in the…
We elicit incomplete preferences over monetary gambles with subjective uncertainty. Subjects rank gambles, and these rankings are used to estimate preferences; payments are based on estimated preferences. About 40\% of subjects express…
The socioeconomic impact of pollution naturally comes with uncertainty due to, e.g., current new technological developments in emissions' abatement or demographic changes. On top of that, the trend of the future costs of the environmental…
Working becomes harder as we grow tired or bored. I model individuals who underestimate these changes in marginal disutility -- as implied by "projection bias" -- when deciding whether or not to continue working. This bias causes people's…
Bipartite experiments are a recent object of study in causal inference, whereby treatment is applied to one set of units and outcomes of interest are measured on a different set of units. These experiments are particularly useful in…
This paper studies the optimal mechanism to motivate effort in a dynamic principal-agent model without transfers. An agent is engaged in a task with uncertain future rewards and can quit at any time. The principal knows the reward and…
We investigate whether risk and time preferences differ when individuals make decisions for others compared to making decisions for themselves. We introduce a novel ``skin in the game'' experimental design, where choices for others incur a…
Study samples often differ from the target populations of inference and policy decisions in non-random ways. Researchers typically believe that such departures from random sampling -- due to changes in the population over time and space, or…
Preference elicitation explicitly asks users what kind of recommendations they would like to receive. It is a popular technique for conversational recommender systems to deal with cold-starts. Previous work has studied selection bias in…
We study the problem of scheduling periodic real-time tasks so as to meet their individual minimum reward requirements. A task generates jobs that can be given arbitrary service times before their deadlines. A task then obtains rewards…
Can uncertainty about credit availability trigger a slowdown in real activity? This question is answered by using a novel method to identify shocks to uncertainty in access to credit. Time-variation in uncertainty about credit availability…
A/B testing refers to the task of determining the best option among two alternatives that yield random outcomes. We provide distribution-dependent lower bounds for the performance of A/B testing that improve over the results currently…
We consider a financial model with permanent price impact. Continuous time trading dynamics are derived as the limit of discrete rebalancing policies. We then study the problem of super-hedging a European option. Our main result is the…
Many measurements at collider experiments study physics candidates that are a subset of a collision event. The presence of multiple such candidates in a given event can cause raw biases which are large compared to typical statistical…
Unconscious bias has been shown to influence how we assess our peers, with consequences for hiring, promotions and admissions. In this work, we focus on affinity bias, the component of unconscious bias which leads us to prefer people who…
Identifying causal effects is a key problem of interest across many disciplines. The two long-standing approaches to estimate causal effects are observational and experimental (randomized) studies. Observational studies can suffer from…
We examine the trade-off between the provision of incentives to exert costly effort (ex-ante moral hazard) and the incentives needed to prevent the agent from manipulating the profit observed by the principal (ex-post moral hazard).…