Related papers: Paternalism and Deliberation: An Experiment on Mak…
We study a model of binary decisions in a fully connected network of interacting agents. Individual decisions are determined by social influence, coming from direct interactions with neighbours, and a group level pressure that accounts for…
Scenario decision making offers a flexible way of making decision in an uncertain environment while obtaining probabilistic guarantees on the risk of failure of the decision. The idea of this approach is to draw samples of the uncertainty…
There has long been debate about the relative merits of decision theoretic methods and heuristic rule-based approaches for reasoning under uncertainty. We report an experimental comparison of the performance of the two approaches to…
Marginal structural models are a popular tool for investigating the effects of time-varying treatments, but they require an assumption of no unobserved confounders between the treatment and outcome. With observational data, this assumption…
We study the effect of latency on binary-choice opinion formation models. Latency is introduced into the models as an additional dynamic rule: after a voter changes its opinion, it enters a waiting period of stochastic length where no…
We develop a qualitative model of decision making with two aims: to describe how people make simple decisions and to enable computer programs to do the same. Current approaches based on Planning or Decisions Theory either ignore uncertainty…
Laboratory testing is an integral tool in the management of patient care in hospitals, particularly in intensive care units (ICUs). There exists an inherent trade-off in the selection and timing of lab tests between considerations of the…
We describe a method for time-critical decision making involving sequential tasks and stochastic processes. The method employs several iterative refinement routines for solving different aspects of the decision making problem. This paper…
Hard constraints in generative sampling are typically enforced by projection, applied either once at the end of sampling or after every update. This binary framing overlooks a fundamental issue: projection changes the distribution of states…
Group elevator scheduling is an NP-hard sequential decision-making problem with unbounded state spaces and substantial uncertainty. Decision-theoretic reasoning plays a surprisingly limited role in fielded systems. A new opportunity for…
Several rules for social choice are examined from a unifying point of view that looks at them as procedures for revising a system of degrees of belief in accordance with certain specified logical constraints. Belief is here a social…
The real-world testing of decisions made using causal machine learning models is an essential prerequisite for their successful application. We focus on evaluating and improving contextual treatment assignment decisions: these are…
In conventional randomized controlled trials, adjustment for baseline values of covariates known to be at least moderately associated with the outcome increases the power of the trial. Recent work has shown particular benefit for more…
Planned experiments are the gold standard in reliably comparing the causal effect of switching from a baseline policy to a new policy. One critical shortcoming of classical experimental methods, however, is that they typically do not take…
Recovering and distinguishing between the strict-preference, indifference and/or indecisiveness parts of a decision maker's preferences is a challenging task but also important for testing theory and conducting welfare analysis. This paper…
This article studies the benefits of using spatially randomized experimental designs which partition the experimental area into distinct, non-overlapping units with treatments assigned randomly. Such designs offer improved policy evaluation…
The issue of whether we make decisions freely has vexed philosophers for millennia, Resolving this is vital for solving a diverse range of problems, from the physiology of how the brain makes decisions (and how we assign moral…
There is available an ever-increasing variety of procedures for managing uncertainty. These methods are discussed in the literature of artificial intelligence, as well as in the literature of philosophy of science. Heretofore these methods…
Robotic systems often use predictive uncertainty to decide whether to act autonomously or defer to a fallback policy. In threshold-gated autonomy, uncertainty matters mainly through its ability to rank likely errors. Standard metrics such…
Digital firms routinely run many online experiments on shared user populations. When product decisions are compositional, such as combinations of interface elements, flows, messages, or incentives, the number of feasible interventions grows…