Related papers: Exploring Welfare Maximization and Fairness in Par…
The econometric literature on treatment-effects typically takes functionals of outcome-distributions as `social welfare' and ignores program-impacts on unobserved utilities. We show how to incorporate aggregate utility within econometric…
Based on the observation that many existing discrete choice models admit a welfare function of utilities whose gradient gives the choice probability vector, we propose a new representation of discrete choice model which we call the…
A principal delegates a project to a team $S$ from a pool of $n$ agents. The project's value if all agents in $S$ exert costly effort is $f(S)$. To incentivize the agents to participate, the principal assigns each agent $i\in S$ a share…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
When selecting committees based on preferences of voters, a variety of different criteria can be considered. Two natural objectives are maximizing the utilitarian welfare (the sum of voters' utilities) and coverage (the number of…
In this work, we propose an axiomatic approach for measuring the performance/welfare of a system consisting of concurrent agents in a resource-driven system. Our approach provides a unifying view on popular system optimality principles,…
We propose a design for philanthropic or publicly-funded seeding to allow (near) optimal provision of a decentralized, self-organizing ecosystem of public goods. The concept extends ideas from Quadratic Voting to a funding mechanism for…
Public confidence in democratic institutions has declined across many OECD countries over recent decades, while political participation and policy influence remain unevenly distributed across socioeconomic groups. Concurrently, democratic…
Decision making in the public sector centers on delivering resources and services for the common good, emphasizing an expansive set of objectives such as equity and efficiency, beyond immediate short term returns to reflect the broader…
In prediction-based decision-making systems, different perspectives can be at odds: The short-term business goals of the decision makers are often in conflict with the decision subjects' wish to be treated fairly. Balancing these two…
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…
Voting methods are instrumental design elements of democracies. Citizens use them to express and aggregate their preferences to reach a collective decision. However, voting outcomes can be as sensitive to voting rules as they are to…
Empirical welfare analyses often impose stringent parametric assumptions on individuals' preferences and neglect unobserved preference heterogeneity. We develop a framework to conduct individual and social welfare analysis for discrete…
According to the proportional allocation mechanism from the network optimization literature, users compete for a divisible resource -- such as bandwidth -- by submitting bids. The mechanism allocates to each user a fraction of the resource…
In approval-based budget division, a budget needs to be distributed to candidates based on the voters' approval ballots over these candidates. In the pursuit of a simple, consistent, and approximately fair rule for this setting, we…
We study non-monetary mechanisms for the fair and efficient allocation of reusable public resources, i.e., resources used for varying durations. We consider settings where a limited resource is repeatedly shared among a set of agents, each…
Participatory budgeting is a popular method to engage residents in budgeting decisions by local governments. The Stanford Participatory Budgeting platform is an online platform that has been used to engage residents in more than 150…
Given an initial resource allocation, where some agents may envy others or where a different distribution of resources might lead to higher social welfare, our goal is to improve the allocation without reassigning resources. We consider a…
Many policies allocate harms or benefits that are uncertain in nature: they produce distributions over the population in which individuals have different probabilities of incurring harm or benefit. Comparing different policies thus involves…
Civic Crowdfunding (CC) uses the ``power of the crowd'' to garner contributions towards public projects. As these projects are non-excludable, agents may prefer to ``free-ride,'' resulting in the project not being funded. For single project…