Related papers: Quantity Limits on Addictive Goods
Regulators and academics are increasingly interested in the causal effect that algorithmic actions of a digital platform have on consumption. We introduce a general causal inference problem we call the steerability of consumption that…
Resource adequacy studies typically use standard metrics such as Loss of Load Expectation and Expected Energy Unserved to quantify the risk of supply shortfalls. This paper critiques present approaches to adequacy assessment and capacity…
Many regulatory and analytic problems require that a prohibited variable influence a decision only through a designated allowable channel -- a conditional-independence requirement that arises in path-specific fairness, the handling of…
This paper presents a semi-quantitative mathematical model of the changes over time in the statistical distribution of well-being of individuals in a society. The model predicts that when individuals overvalue the more socially conspicuous…
The conditions that can lead to the exploitative depletion of a shared resource, i.e, the tragedy of the commons, can be reformulated as a game of prisoner's dilemma: while preserving the common resource is in the best interest of the…
This paper introduces time-based addiction, which refers to excessive engagement in an activity that results in negative outcomes due to the misallocation of time. This type of addiction is often seen in media-related activities such as…
Building on the idea that lack of experience is a source of errors but that experience should reduce them, we model agents' behavior using a stochastic choice model (logit quantal response), leaving endogenous the accuracy of their choices.…
People are influenced by the choices of others, a phenomenon observed across contexts in the social and behavioral sciences. Social influence can lock in an initial popularity advantage of an option over a higher quality alternative. Yet…
Medication adherence is a well-known problem for pharmaceutical treatment of chronic diseases. Understanding how nonadherence affects treatment efficacy is made difficult by the ethics of clinical trials that force patients to skip doses of…
Medical non-adherence increasingly is recognized as a major medical health problem. Approximately 50% of patients do not take their medications as prescribed and such poor adherence has been shown to result in complications, death, and…
Auction theories are believed to provide a better selling opportunity for the resources to be allocated. Various organizations have taken measures to increase trust among participants towards their auction system, but trust alone cannot…
We characterize regularity (Block & Marschak, 1960) within a novel stochastic model: the General Threshold Luce model [GTLM]. We apply our results to study choice overload, identified by regularity violations that impose a welfare cost on…
We investigate adaptive protocols for the elimination or reduction of the use of medications or addictive substances. We formalize this problem as online optimization, minimizing the cumulative dose subject to constraints on well-being. We…
We address a novel approach for stochastic individual-based modelling of a single species population. Individuals are distinguished by their remaining lifetimes, which are regulated by the interplay between the inexorable running of time…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
Much research has been conducted on how consumption is related to human relations, for example, consumer communities organized around specific brands, or the way people use products to define their own identity and transmit a desired image.…
Aging interventions frequently improve function and healthspan without arresting long-term deterioration, indicating that existing frameworks do not fully specify the control conditions required for bounded organismal aging. A compact…
Attention capitalism has generated design processes and product development decisions that prioritize platform growth over all other considerations. To the extent limits have been placed on these incentives, interventions have primarily…
Despite the massive costs and widespread harms of substance use, most individuals with substance use disorders (SUDs) receive no treatment at all. Digital therapeutics platforms are an emerging low-cost and low-barrier means of extending…
One way to make decisions under uncertainty is to select an optimal option from a possible range of options, by maximizing the expected utilities derived from a probability model. However, under severe uncertainty, identifying precise…