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We study how individuals trade off outcome ("what") and process ("how") utility in high-stakes strategic decisions, namely professional tennis. Using optimality conditions and the second-service rule, we derive a sufficient condition for…
Game theory relies heavily on the availability of cardinal utility functions, but in fields such as matching markets, only ordinal preferences are typically elicited. The literature focuses on mechanisms with simple dominant strategies, but…
In real life auctions, a widely observed phenomenon is the winner's curse -- the winner's high bid implies that the winner often over-estimates the value of the good for sale, resulting in an incurred negative utility. The seminal work of…
In the NFL draft, teams must strategically balance immediate player impact against long-term value, presenting a complex optimization challenge for draft capital management. This paper introduces a framework for evaluating the fairness and…
The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk…
The "significance filter" refers to focusing exclusively on statistically significant results. Since frequentist properties such as unbiasedness and coverage are valid only before the data have been observed, there are no guarantees if we…
Decision-makers often deploy the best-performing treatment from a randomized experiment, creating a winner's curse: selection favors treatments whose observed outcomes are high partly because of statistical noise, so the na\"ive estimate of…
Across science and policy, decision-makers often need to draw conclusions about the best candidate among competing alternatives. For instance, researchers may seek to infer the effectiveness of the most successful treatment or determine…
Decision theory does not traditionally include uncertainty over utility functions. We argue that the a person's utility value for a given outcome can be treated as we treat other domain attributes: as a random variable with a density…
Statistical protocols are often used for decision-making involving multiple parties, each with their own incentives, private information, and ability to influence the distributional properties of the data. We study a game-theoretic version…
Do NFL teams make rational decisions? What factors potentially affect the probability of wining a game in NFL? How can a team come back from a demoralizing interception? In this study we begin by examining the hypothesis of rational…
Intelligent agents rely on AI/ML functionalities to predict the consequence of possible actions and optimise the policy. However, the effort of the research community in addressing prediction accuracy has been so intense (and successful)…
A major challenge in data-driven decision-making is accurate policy evaluation-i.e., guaranteeing that a learned decision-making policy achieves the promised benefits. A popular strategy is model-based policy evaluation, which estimates a…
We initiate a novel direction in randomized social choice by proposing a new definition of agent utility for randomized outcomes. Each agent has a preference over all outcomes and a {\em quantile} parameter. Given a {\em lottery} over the…
Gambles are random variables that model possible changes in monetary wealth. Classic decision theory transforms money into utility through a utility function and defines the value of a gamble as the expectation value of utility changes.…
The well-studied problem of statistical rank aggregation has been applied to comparing sports teams, information retrieval, and most recently to data generated by human judgment. Such human-generated rankings may be substantially different…
Noncooperative games with uncertain payoffs have been classically studied under the expected-utility theory framework, which relies on the strong assumption that agents behave rationally. However, simple experiments on human decision makers…
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…
Approaches to decision-making under uncertainty in the belief function framework are reviewed. Most methods are shown to blend criteria for decision under ignorance with the maximum expected utility principle of Bayesian decision theory. A…
Expected points is a value function fundamental to player evaluation and strategic in-game decision-making across sports analytics, particularly in American football. To estimate expected points, football analysts use machine learning…