Related papers: Quantity Limits on Addictive Goods
We study the subtlety of optimal paternalism when a utilitarian planner has the power to design a discrete choice set for a heterogeneous population with bounded rationality. We first consider the planning problem in abstraction. We show…
Emerging geopolitical risks have begun to threaten global supply chains, including those that produce life-saving drugs. Export bans may prevent a company from shipping products internationally, and it is unclear how these new dynamics may…
Personal health devices can enable continuous monitoring of health parameters. However, the benefit of these devices is often directly related to the frequency of use. Therefore, adherence to personal health devices is critical. This paper…
A general multi-type population model is considered, where individuals live and reproduce according to their age and type, but also under the influence of the size and composition of the entire population. We describe the dynamics of the…
Recommendation systems capable of providing diverse sets of results are a focus of increasing importance, with motivations ranging from fairness to novelty and other aspects of optimizing user experience. One form of diversity of recent…
The condition for adiabatic approximation are of basic importance for the applications of the adiabatic theorem. The traditional quantitative condition was found to be necessary but not sufficient, but we do not know its physical meaning…
Practical news feed platforms generate a hybrid list of news articles and advertising items (e.g., products, services, or information) and many platforms optimize the position of news articles and advertisements independently. However, they…
Recommender systems can be a helpful tool for recommending content but they can also influence users' preferences. One sociological theory for this influence is that companies are incentivised to influence preferences to make users easier…
This paper considers incentives to provide goods that are partially shareable along social links. We introduce a model in which each individual in a social network not only decides how much of a shareable good to provide, but also decides…
Capacity restrictions in stores, maintained by mechanisms like spacing customer intake, became familiar features of retailing in the time of the pandemic. Shopping rates in a crowded store under a social distance regime is prone to…
We consider a stochastic system whose uncontrolled state dynamics are modelled by a general one-dimensional It\^{o} diffusion. The control effort that can be applied to this system takes the form that is associated with the so-called…
Ecologists have long argued about the strength of density dependence and population regulation, respectively defined as the short-term and long-term rates of return to equilibrium. Here, I give three arguments for the intractability of…
Addressing global challenges often involves stimulating the large-scale adoption of new products or behaviors. Research traditions that focus on individual decision making suggest that achieving this objective requires identifying the…
People care more about the solutions to their problems rather than data alone. Inherently, this means using data to generate a list of recommendations for a given situation. The rapid growth of multi-modal wearables and sensors have not…
AI systems are often used to make or contribute to important decisions in a growing range of applications, including criminal justice, hiring, and medicine. Since these decisions impact human lives, it is important that the AI systems act…
We propose martingale consumption as a natural, desirable consumption pattern for any given (proportional) investment strategy. The idea is to always adjust current consumption so as to achieve level expected future consumption under the…
Although creativity is encouraged in the abstract it is often discouraged in educational and workplace settings. Using an agent-based model of cultural evolution, we investigated the idea that tempering the novelty-generating effects of…
When individuals interact in groups, the evolution of cooperation is traditionally modeled using the framework of public goods games. These models often assume that the return of the public good depends linearly on the fraction of…
We propose a general framework for studying adaptive regret bounds in the online learning framework, including model selection bounds and data-dependent bounds. Given a data- or model-dependent bound we ask, "Does there exist some algorithm…
Online platforms have a wealth of data, run countless experiments and use industrial-scale algorithms to optimize user experience. Despite this, many users seem to regret the time they spend on these platforms. One possible explanation is…