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This paper assumes each individual in society has a random discount factor and assesses an intertemporal project using rank-dependent expected utility theory. We consider both the ex ante and the ex post approaches. For the former, we show…
People often face trade-offs between costs and benefits occurring at various points in time. The predominant discounting approach is to use the exponential form. Central to this approach is the discount rate, a unique parameter that…
In this paper, we introduce a model that adds a non-linearity to discounting: the discounting factor may depend on the notional (i.e., discounted values are no longer linear in the notional). In the first part of the paper, we provide a…
This paper derives a novel representation of the exponential discounting model that allows one to assess departures from the model via a measure of efficiency. The approach uses a revealed preference methodology that does not make any…
The policy gradient theorem describes the gradient of the expected discounted return with respect to an agent's policy parameters. However, most policy gradient methods drop the discount factor from the state distribution and therefore do…
The valuation process that economic agents undergo for investments with uncertain payoff typically depends on their statistical views on possible future outcomes, their attitudes toward risk, and, of course, the payoff structure itself.…
Many popular policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning follow a biased approximation of the policy gradient known as the discounted approximation. While it has been shown that the discounted approximation of the policy gradient is…
An important question in economics is how people choose between different payments in the future. The classical normative model predicts that a decision maker discounts a later payment relative to an earlier one by an exponential function…
In recent years, an increasing amount of data is collected in different and often, not cooperative, databases. The problem of privacy-preserving, distributed calculations over separated databases and, a relative to it, issue of private data…
Evaluating the financial performance of manufacturing firms requires consideration of both the time value of money and the relative importance of multiple decision criteria. Conventional approaches relying solely on deterministic…
This chapter provides a tutorial that the reader can follow towards analyzing discounting data. Previous chapters have already described the breadth of outcomes associated with discounting (Odum et al. 2020) and other background information…
Price discrimination for maximizing expected profit is a well-studied concept in economics and there are various methods that achieve the maximum given the user type distribution and the budget constraints. In many applications,…
In practical reinforcement learning (RL), the discount factor used for estimating value functions often differs from that used for defining the evaluation objective. In this work, we study the effect that this discrepancy of discount…
Evaluation metrics are an essential part of a ranking system, and in the past many evaluation metrics have been proposed in information retrieval and Web search. Discounted Cumulated Gains (DCG) has emerged as one of the evaluation metrics…
We study statistical discrimination of individuals based on payoff-irrelevant social identities in markets that utilize ratings and recommendations for social learning. Even though rating/recommendation algorithms can be designed to be fair…
Statistical matching methods are widely used in the social and health sciences to estimate causal effects using observational data. Often the objective is to find comparable groups with similar covariate distributions in a dataset, with the…
Statistical agencies rely on sampling techniques to collect socio-demographic data crucial for policy-making and resource allocation. This paper shows that surveys of important societal relevance introduce sampling errors that unevenly…
When decision makers evaluate a sequence of rewards, they may pay more attention to larger rewards and, given attention is limited, less attention to smaller rewards. They may also become less attentive to each reward when attention is…
Public discourse and opinions stem from multiple social groups. Each group has beliefs about a topic (such as vaccination, abortion, gay marriage, etc.), and opinions are exchanged and blended to produce consensus. A particular measure of…
A novel strategy aimed at cooperatively differentiating a signal among multiple interacting agents is introduced, where none of the agents needs to know which agent is the leader, i.e. the one producing the signal to be differentiated.…