Related papers: Quantile agent utility and implications to randomi…
We consider the egalitarian welfare aspects of random assignment mechanisms when agents have unrestricted cardinal utilities over the objects. We give bounds on how well different random assignment mechanisms approximate the optimal…
We determine the quality of randomized social choice mechanisms in a setting in which the agents have metric preferences: every agent has a cost for each alternative, and these costs form a metric. We assume that these costs are unknown to…
Random utility theory models an agent's preferences on alternatives by drawing a real-valued score on each alternative (typically independently) from a parameterized distribution, and then ranking the alternatives according to scores. A…
Two prominent objectives in social choice are utilitarian - maximizing the sum of agents' utilities, and leximin - maximizing the smallest agent's utility, then the second-smallest, etc. Utilitarianism is typically computationally easier to…
We consider an agent interacting with an unknown environment. The environment is a function which maps natural numbers to natural numbers; the agent's set of hypotheses about the environment contains all such functions which are computable…
We propose a new model for aggregating preferences over a set of indivisible items based on a quantile value. In this model, each agent is endowed with a specific quantile, and the value of a given bundle is defined by the corresponding…
The influence of additional information on the decision making of agents, who are interacting members of a society, is analyzed within the mathematical framework based on the use of quantum probabilities. The introduction of social…
We study a version of the minority game in which one agent is allowed to join the game in a random fashion. It is shown that in the crowded regime, i.e., for small values of the memory size $m$ of the agents in the population, the agent…
Sequential allocation is a simple and widely studied mechanism to allocate indivisible items in turns to agents according to a pre-specified picking sequence of agents. At each turn, the current agent in the picking sequence picks its most…
In this paper, we study a novel Stochastic Network Utility Maximization (NUM) problem where the utilities of agents are unknown. The utility of each agent depends on the amount of resource it receives from a network operator/controller. The…
Rewards typically express desirabilities or preferences over a set of alternatives. Here we propose that rewards can be defined for any probability distribution based on three desiderata, namely that rewards should be real-valued, additive…
We study the problem of mechanism design for allocating a set of indivisible items among agents with private preferences on items. We are interested in such a mechanism that is strategyproof (where agents' best strategy is to report their…
We study efficiency in general collective choice problems where agents have ordinal preferences and randomization is allowed. We explore the structure of preference profiles where ex-ante and ex-post efficiency coincide, offer a unifying…
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…
The probabilistic serial (PS) rule is one of the most prominent randomized rules for the assignment problem. It is well-known for its superior fairness and welfare properties. However, PS is not immune to manipulative behaviour by the…
The influence of additional information on the decision making of agents, who are interacting members of a society, is analyzed within the mathematical framework based on the use of quantum probabilities. The introduction of social…
We consider a simple sequential allocation procedure for sharing indivisible items between agents in which agents take turns to pick items. Supposing additive utilities and independence between the agents, we show that the expected utility…
We investigate how the choice of decision makers can be varied under the presence of risk and uncertainty. Our analysis is based on the approach we have previously applied to individual decision makers, which we now generalize to the case…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
We investigate the power of randomness in the context of a fundamental Bayesian optimal mechanism design problem--a single seller aims to maximize expected revenue by allocating multiple kinds of resources to "unit-demand" agents with…