Related papers: Utilitarian Social Choice and Distributional Welfa…
The Random Utility Model (RUM) is the leading model to represent the aggregate choices of a heterogeneous population of preference maximizers. We show that if (and only if) preferences are sufficiently uncorrelated, RUM choices can also be…
Information policies such as scores, ratings, and recommendations are increasingly shaping society's choices in high-stakes domains. We provide a framework to study the welfare implications of information policies on a population of…
Social choice theory offers a wealth of approaches for selecting a candidate on behalf of voters based on their reported preference rankings over options. When voters have underlying utilities for these options, however, using preference…
In this paper, we explore optimal treatment allocation policies that target distributional welfare. Most literature on treatment choice has considered utilitarian welfare based on the conditional average treatment effect (ATE). While…
This paper proposes a framewrok for analyzing how the welfare effects of policy interventions are distributed across individuals when those effects are unobserved. Rather than focusing solely on average outcomes, the approach uses readily…
Is it possible to understand or imitate a policy maker's rationale by looking at past decisions they made? We formalize this question as the problem of learning social welfare functions belonging to the well-studied family of power mean…
Most analyses of manipulation of voting schemes have adopted two assumptions that greatly diminish their practical import. First, it is usually assumed that the manipulators have full knowledge of the votes of the nonmanipulating agents.…
Sequential allocation is a simple and attractive mechanism for the allocation of indivisible goods. Agents take turns, according to a policy, to pick items. Sequential allocation is guaranteed to return an allocation which is efficient but…
In several socioeconomic-critical decision-making settings, such as fair resource allocation, climate policy, or AI alignment, multiple principals interact within a common arena. While it is well established that these principals may have…
Social choice is the theory about collective decision towards social welfare starting from individual opinions, preferences, interests or welfare. The field of Computational Social Welfare is somewhat recent and it is gaining impact in the…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a voting paradigm for distributing a divisible resource, usually called a budget, among a set of projects by aggregating the preferences of individuals over these projects. It is implemented quite extensively…
We present an abstract social aggregation theorem. Society, and each individual, has a preorder that may be interpreted as expressing values or beliefs. The preorders are allowed to violate both completeness and continuity, and the…
This paper studies the allocation of voting weights in a committee representing groups of different sizes. We introduce a partial ordering of weight allocations based on stochastic comparison of social welfare. We show that when the number…
An individually costly act that benefits all group members is a public good. Natural selection favors individual contribution to public goods only when some benefit to the individual offsets the cost of contribution. Problems of sex ratio,…
Inferring a decision maker's utility function typically involves an elicitation phase where the decision maker responds to a series of elicitation queries, followed by an estimation phase where the state-of-the-art is to either fit the…
We study fair allocation of constrained resources, where a market designer optimizes overall welfare while maintaining group fairness. In many large-scale settings, utilities are not known in advance, but are instead observed after…
Participatory budgeting refers to the practice of allocating public resources by collecting and aggregating individual preferences. Most existing studies in this field often assume an additive utility function, where each individual holds a…
We initiate the study of multidimensional Bayesian utility maximization, focusing on the unit-demand setting where values are i.i.d. across both items and buyers. The seminal result of Hartline and Roughgarden '08 studies simple,…
We consider a model where a subset of candidates must be selected based on voter preferences, subject to general constraints that specify which subsets are feasible. This model generalizes committee elections with diversity constraints,…
Standard decision theory seeks conditions under which a preference relation can be compressed into a single real-valued function. However, when preferences are incomplete or intransitive, a single function fails to capture the agent's…