Related papers: Welfare as a Guiding Principle for Machine Learnin…

This paper studies algorithmic decision-making in the presence of strategic individual behaviors, where an ML model is used to make decisions about human agents and the latter can adapt their behavior strategically to improve their future…

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…

Now that machine learning algorithms lie at the center of many resource allocation pipelines, computer scientists have been unwittingly cast as partial social planners. Given this state of affairs, important questions follow. What is the…

Machine learning is increasingly used in government programs to identify and support the most vulnerable individuals, prioritizing assistance for those at greatest risk over optimizing aggregate outcomes. This paper examines the welfare…

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…

Current methodologies in machine learning analyze the effects of various statistical parity notions of fairness primarily in light of their impacts on predictive accuracy and vendor utility loss. In this paper, we propose a new framework…

From social networks to supply chains, more and more aspects of how humans, firms and organizations interact is mediated by artificial learning agents. As the influence of machine learning systems grows, it is paramount that we study how to…

Scoring systems, as a type of predictive model, have significant advantages in interpretability and transparency and facilitate quick decision-making. As such, scoring systems have been extensively used in a wide variety of industries such…

Motivated by applications such as college admission and insurance rate determination, we propose an evaluation problem where the inputs are controlled by strategic individuals who can modify their features at a cost. A learner can only…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly entrusted with high-stakes decisions that affect human welfare. However, the principles and values that guide these models when distributing scarce societal resources remain largely unexamined.…

Neuroeconomics promises to ground welfare analysis in neural and computational evidence about how people value outcomes, learn from experience and exercise self-control. At the same time, policy and commercial actors increasingly invoke…

In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), deployed policies have varied impacts on different stakeholders, creating challenges in reaching consensus on how to effectively aggregate their preferences. Generalized…

Decision support systems (e.g., for ecological conservation) and autonomous systems (e.g., adaptive controllers in smart cities) start to be deployed in real applications. Although their operations often impact many users or stakeholders,…

We study fair multi-objective reinforcement learning in which an agent must learn a policy that simultaneously achieves high reward on multiple dimensions of a vector-valued reward. Motivated by the fair resource allocation literature, we…

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…

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into economic systems represents a transformative shift in decision-making frameworks, introducing novel dynamics between human and AI agents. This paper proposes a welfare model that…

We address an inherent difficulty in welfare-theoretic fair machine learning by proposing an equivalently axiomatically-justified alternative and studying the resulting computational and statistical learning questions. Welfare metrics…

Machine Learning (ML) algorithms shape our lives. Banks use them to determine if we are good borrowers; IT companies delegate them recruitment decisions; police apply ML for crime-prediction, and judges base their verdicts on ML. However,…

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…

Machine learning algorithms can now outperform classic economic models in predicting quantities ranging from bargaining outcomes, to choice under uncertainty, to an individual's future jobs and wages. Yet this predictive accuracy comes at a…