Related papers: Utilitarian Social Choice and Distributional Welfa…
Substantial empirical research has shown that the level of individualism vs. collectivism is one of the most critical and important determinants of societal traits, such as economic growth, economic institutions and health conditions. But…
What is the best compromise in a situation where different people value different things? The most commonly accepted method for answering this question -- in fields across the behavioral and social sciences, decision theory, philosophy, and…
This paper provides a general framework to explore the possibility of agenda manipulation-proof and proper consensus-based preference aggregation rules, so powerfully called in doubt by a disputable if widely shared understanding of Arrow's…
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…
The random utility model (RUM, McFadden and Richter, 1990) has been the standard tool to describe the behavior of a population of decision makers. RUM assumes that decision makers behave as if they maximize a rational preference over a…
A voting rule decides on a probability distribution over a set of m alternatives, based on rankings of those alternatives provided by agents. We assume that agents have cardinal utility functions over the alternatives, but voting rules have…
We present a recommender system based on the Random Utility Model. Online shoppers are modeled as rational decision makers with limited information, and the recommendation task is formulated as the problem of optimally enriching the…
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…
We present a method for calculating and analyzing stakeholder utilities of processes that arise in, but are not limited to, the social sciences. These areas include business process analysis, healthcare workflow analysis and policy process…
When evaluating policies that affect future generations, the most commonly used criterion is the discounted utilitarian rule. However, in terms of intergenerational fairness, it is difficult to justify prioritizing the current generation…
Algorithmic predictions are increasingly used to inform the allocations of goods and interventions in the public sphere. In these domains, predictions serve as a means to an end. They provide stakeholders with insights into likelihood of…
In a consideration set model, an individual maximizes utility among the considered alternatives. I relate a consideration set additive random utility model to classic discrete choice and the extended additive random utility model, in which…
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…
We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred.…
Mutually exclusive decisions have been studied for decades. Many well-known decision theories have been defined to help people either to make rational decisions or to interpret people's behaviors, such as expected utility theory, regret…
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…
We interpret a fuzzy set as a random availability function and provide sufficient conditions under which a preference relation over the set of all random availability functions can be represented by a utility function.
We propose social welfare optimization as a general paradigm for formalizing fairness in AI systems. We argue that optimization models allow formulation of a wide range of fairness criteria as social welfare functions, while enabling AI to…
Most social choice rules assume access to full rankings, while current alignment practice -- despite aiming for diversity -- typically treats voters as anonymous and comparisons as independent, effectively extracting only about one bit per…
We analyze demand settings where heterogeneous consumers maximize utility for product attributes subject to a nonlinear budget constraint. We develop nonparametric methods for welfare-analysis of interventions that change the constraint.…