Related papers: How to Make an Action Attractive
This paper studies the persuasion of a receiver who accesses information only if she exerts costly attention effort. A sender designs an experiment to persuade the receiver to take a specific action. The experiment affects the receiver's…
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…
An agent chooses an action based on her private information and a recommendation from an informed but potentially misaligned adviser. With a known probability, the adviser truthfully reports his signal; with the remaining probability, he…
We consider settings where an uninformed principal must hear arguments from two better-informed agents, corresponding to two possible courses of action that they argue for. The arguments are verifiable in the sense that the true state of…
A planner wants to select one agent out of n agents on the basis of a binary characteristic that is commonly known to all agents but is not observed by the planner. Any pair of agents can either be friends or enemies or impartials of each…
A demandance is a psychological "pull" exerted by a stimulus. It is closely related to the theory of "affordance". I introduce the theory of demandance, offer some motivating examples, briefly explore its psychological basis, and examine…
I consider decision-making constrained by considerations of morality, rationality, or other virtues. The decision maker (DM) has a true preference over outcomes, but feels compelled to choose among outcomes that are top-ranked by some…
Identifying who should be treated is a central question in economics. There are two competing approaches to targeting - paternalistic and autonomous. In the paternalistic approach, policymakers optimally target the policy given observable…
Mandatory waiting periods have been instituted for medical procedures, gun purchases, and other high-stakes decisions. Are these softly paternalistic policies substitutes for harder restrictions, and are delayed decisions more respected? In…
We study a persuasion problem in which a sender designs an information structure to induce a non-Bayesian receiver to take a particular action. The receiver, who is privately informed about his preferences, is a wishful thinker: he is…
We study strategic classification in binary decision-making settings where agents can modify their features in order to improve their classification outcomes. Importantly, our work considers the causal structure across different features,…
If capable AI agents are generally incentivized to seek power in service of the objectives we specify for them, then these systems will pose enormous risks, in addition to enormous benefits. In fully observable environments, most reward…
We show that it is possible to understand and identify a decision maker's subjective causal judgements by observing her preferences over interventions. Following Pearl [2000], we represent causality using causal models (also called…
This paper investigates the problem of finding a preference relation on a set of acts from the knowledge of an ordering on events (subsets of states of the world) describing the decision-maker (DM)s uncertainty and an ordering of…
When explaining black-box machine learning models, it's often important for explanations to have certain desirable properties. Most existing methods `encourage' desirable properties in their construction of explanations. In this work, we…
Algorithmic recourse aims to provide actionable recommendations that enable individuals to change unfavorable model outcomes, and prior work has extensively studied properties such as efficiency, robustness, and fairness. However, the role…
Norms have been extensively proposed as coordination mechanisms for both agent and human societies. Nevertheless, choosing the norms to regulate a society is by no means straightforward. The reasons are twofold. First, the norms to choose…
We consider an agent community wishing to decide on several binary issues by means of issue-by-issue majority voting. For each issue and each agent, one of the two options is better than the other. However, some of the agents may be…
We study finite-state communication games in which the sender's preference is perturbed by random private idiosyncrasies. Persuasion is generically impossible within the class of statistically independent sender/receiver preferences --…
We study what changes to an agent's decision problem increase her value for information. We prove that information becomes more valuable if and only if the agent's reduced-form payoff in her belief becomes more convex. When the…