Related papers: Policy Design in Long-Run Welfare Dynamics
Using both single-index measures and stochastic dominance concepts, we show how Bayesian inference can be used to make multivariate welfare comparisons. A four-dimensional distribution for the well-being attributes income, mental health,…
Across various domains--such as health, education, and housing--improving societal welfare involves allocating resources, setting policies, targeting interventions, and regulating activities. These solutions have an immense impact on the…
A policymaker discloses public information to interacting agents who also acquire costly private information. More precise public information reduces the precision and cost of acquired private information. Considering this effect, what…
A number of goods are called identical if they provide the same level of utility to each agent. In various real-world instances of fair division scenarios, identical indivisible items are allocated to consumers and demandants with different…
Strategic voting, or manipulation, is the process by which a voter misrepresents his preferences in an attempt to elect an outcome that he considers preferable to the outcome under sincere voting. It is generally agreed that manipulation is…
I introduce a concave function of allocations and prices -- the economy's potential -- which measures the difference between utilitarian social welfare and its dual. I show that Walrasian equilibria correspond to roots of the potential:…
Empirical research shows that individuals' responses to treatments vary along latent characteristics, such as innate ability or motivation. Therefore, a policymaker seeking to maximize welfare may consider designing policies based on…
We consider a regulator willing to drive individual choices towards increasing social welfare by providing incentives to a large population of individuals. For that purpose, we formalize and solve the problem of finding an optimal…
This paper revisits the classic instrument choice problem in a setting with consumption externalities, through the lens of robust mechanism design. A regulator can implement any incentive-compatible policy but is uncertain about how…
We consider social welfare functions when the preferences of individual agents and society maximize subjective expected utility in the tradition of Savage. A system of axioms is introduced whose unique solution is the social welfare…
Decision theory has become widely accepted in the AI community as a useful framework for planning and decision making. Applying the framework typically requires elicitation of some form of probability and utility information. While much…
We consider the problem of estimating personalized treatment policies that are "externally valid" or "generalizable": they perform well in target populations that differ from the experimental (or training) population from which the data are…
This paper introduces metrics for welfare analysis in dynamic models. We develop estimation and inference for these parameters even in the presence of a high-dimensional state space. Examples of welfare metrics include average welfare,…
How should we think of the preferences of citizens? Whereas self-optimal policy is relatively straightforward to produce, socially optimal policy often requires a more detailed examination. In this paper, we identify an issue that has…
Humans have developed considerable machinery used at scale to create policies and to distribute incentives, yet we are forever seeking ways in which to improve upon these, our institutions. Especially when funding is limited, it is…
We study the problem of a decision maker who must provide the best possible treatment recommendation based on an experiment. The desirability of the outcome distribution resulting from the policy recommendation is measured through a…
In many scheduling applications, minimizing delays is of high importance. One adverse effect of such delays is that the reward for completion of a job may decay over time. Indeed in healthcare settings, delays in access to care can result…
We analyze and quantify, in a financial market with parameter uncertainty and for a Constant Relative Risk Aversion investor, the utility effects of two different boundedly rational (i.e., sub-optimal) investment strategies (namely, myopic…
Standard rational actor models often attribute cooperation failures in social dilemmas to insufficient incentives, overlooking the destabilizing effects of continuous utility maximization. To address this, we propose a framework of ``will"…
We study a dynamic allocation problem in which $T$ sequentially arriving divisible resources are to be allocated to a number of agents with linear utilities. The marginal utilities of each resource to the agents are drawn stochastically…