Related papers: Protected Income and Inequality Aversion
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
We develop an axiomatic framework to evaluate income distributions from the perspective of an opportunity-egalitarian social planner. Building on a formal link with the literature on decision theory under ambiguity, we characterize a class…
Medical "Crisis Standards of Care" call for a utilitarian allocation of scarce resources in emergencies, while favoring the worst-off under normal conditions. Inspired by such triage rules, we introduce social welfare functions whose…
We propose and axiomatize a new model of incomplete preferences under uncertainty, which we call \textit{hope-and-prepare preferences}. An act is considered more desirable than an other act when, and only when, both an optimistic…
This paper develops theoretical criteria and econometric methods to rank policy interventions in terms of welfare when individuals are loss-averse. Our new criterion for "loss aversion-sensitive dominance" defines a weak partial ordering of…
While enforcing egalitarian social norms is critical for human society, punishing social norm violators often incurs a cost to the self. This cost looms even larger when one can benefit from an unequal distribution of resources (i.e.…
We study the power of item-pricing as a tool for approximately optimizing social welfare in a combinatorial market. We consider markets with $m$ indivisible items and $n$ buyers. The goal is to set prices to the items so that, when agents…
This paper attempts to find a relationship between agents' risk aversion and inequality of incomes. Specifically, a model is proposed for the evolution in time of surplus/deficit distribution, and the long-time distributions are…
We study the fundamental problem of allocating indivisible goods to agents with additive preferences. We consider eliciting from each agent only a ranking of her $k$ most preferred goods instead of her full cardinal valuations. We…
Recovering and distinguishing between the strict-preference, indifference and/or indecisiveness parts of a decision maker's preferences is a challenging task but also important for testing theory and conducting welfare analysis. This paper…
When information acquisition is costly but flexible, a principal may rationally acquire information that favors one group over another. The former group faces incentives to invest in becoming productive, while the latter is discouraged from…
We propose a new model for aggregating preferences over a set of indivisible items based on a quantile value. In this model, each agent is endowed with a specific quantile, and the value of a given bundle is defined by the corresponding…
Selective regression allows abstention from prediction if the confidence to make an accurate prediction is not sufficient. In general, by allowing a reject option, one expects the performance of a regression model to increase at the cost of…
Abstaining classifiers have the option to refrain from providing a prediction for instances that are difficult to classify. The abstention mechanism is designed to trade off the classifier's performance on the accepted data while ensuring a…
We revisit the setting of fairly allocating indivisible items when agents have different weights representing their entitlements. First, we propose a parameterized family of relaxations for weighted envy-freeness and the same for weighted…
This study proposes a new efficiency requirement, a minimal almost weak Pareto principle, which says that x is socially better than y whenever the only one individual never prefers y to x, and all the others prefers x to y. Then, I show…
Fairly dividing a set of indivisible resources to a set of agents is of utmost importance in some applications. However, after an allocation has been implemented the preferences of agents might change and envy might arise. We study the…
Consider the seller's problem of finding optimal prices for her $n$ (divisible) goods when faced with a set of $m$ consumers, given that she can only observe their purchased bundles at posted prices, i.e., revealed preferences. We study…
Actual individual preferences are neither complete (=total) nor antisymmetric in general, so that at least every quasi-order must be an admissible input to a satisfactory choice rule. It is argued that the traditional notion of…
We propose a criterion for discrimination against a specified sensitive attribute in supervised learning, where the goal is to predict some target based on available features. Assuming data about the predictor, target, and membership in the…