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Related papers: Policy Learning with $\alpha$-Expected Welfare

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Reward-Weighted Regression (RWR) belongs to a family of widely known iterative Reinforcement Learning algorithms based on the Expectation-Maximization framework. In this family, learning at each iteration consists of sampling a batch of…

Public policies and medical interventions often involve dynamic treatment assignments, in which individuals receive a sequence of interventions over multiple stages. We study the statistical learning of optimal dynamic treatment regimes…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-21 Shosei Sakaguchi

We consider constrained policy optimization in Reinforcement Learning, where the constraints are in form of marginals on state visitations and global action executions. Given these distributions, we formulate policy optimization as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-17 Arash Givchi , Pei Wang , Junqi Wang , Patrick Shafto

In the Submodular Welfare Maximization (SWM) problem, the input consists of a set of $n$ items, each of which must be allocated to one of $m$ agents. Each agent $\ell$ has a valuation function $v_\ell$, where $v_\ell(S)$ denotes the welfare…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-12-18 Nitish Korula , Vahab Mirrokni , Morteza Zadimoghaddam

I study the problem of a decision maker choosing a policy which allocates treatment to a heterogeneous population on the basis of experimental data that includes only a subset of possible treatment values. The effects of new treatments are…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-07-17 Samuel Higbee

Many social programs attempt to allocate scarce resources to people with the greatest need. Indeed, public services increasingly use algorithmic risk assessments motivated by this goal. However, targeting the highest-need recipients often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Bryan Wilder , Pim Welle

Designing individualized allocation of treatments so as to maximize the equilibrium welfare of interacting agents has many policy-relevant applications. Focusing on sequential decision games of interacting agents, this paper develops a…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-15 Toru Kitagawa , Guanyi Wang

In the allocation of indivisible goods, the maximum Nash welfare (MNW) rule, which chooses an allocation maximizing the product of the agents' utilities, has received substantial attention for its fairness. We characterize MNW as the only…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-12-20 Warut Suksompong

Selective labels are a common feature of consequential decision-making applications, referring to the lack of observed outcomes under one of the possible decisions. This paper reports work in progress on learning decision policies in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Dennis Wei

Allocating indivisible goods is a ubiquitous task in fair division. We study additive welfarist rules, an important class of rules which choose an allocation that maximizes the sum of some function of the agents' utilities. Prior work has…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Karen Frilya Celine , Warut Suksompong , Sheung Man Yuen

This paper studies sample-size design for finite-population test-and-roll experiments, where a decision-maker first conducts an experiment on $m$ units and then assigns the remaining $N-m$ units to the treatment that performs better in the…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-05 Kentaro Kawato , Shosei Sakaguchi

We consider the bilateral trade problem, in which two agents trade a single indivisible item. It is known that the only dominant-strategy truthful mechanism is the fixed-price mechanism: given commonly known distributions of the buyer's…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Zi Yang Kang , Francisco Pernice , Jan Vondrák

We study market mechanisms for allocating divisible goods to competing agents with quasilinear utilities. For \emph{linear} pricing (i.e., the cost of a good is proportional to the quantity purchased), the First Welfare Theorem states that…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Ashish Goel , Benjamin Plaut

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…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Andrea Tacchetti , DJ Strouse , Marta Garnelo , Thore Graepel , Yoram Bachrach

In this work, we introduce a novel estimator of the predictive risk with Poisson data, when the loss function is the Kullback-Leibler divergence, in order to define a regularization parameter's choice rule for the Expectation Maximization…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-05-26 Paolo Massa , Federico Benvenuto

In this article, we study the optimization of resource distributions in a one-dimensional logistic diffusive model. The goal is to determine a distribution on a bounded one-dimensional domain that maximizes the total population at…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2025-11-21 Junyoung Heo , Yubin Lee

We investigate the problem of maximizing social welfare while ensuring fairness in a multi-agent multi-armed bandit (MA-MAB) setting. In this problem, a centralized decision-maker takes actions over time, generating random rewards for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Piyushi Manupriya , Himanshu , SakethaNath Jagarlapudi , Ganesh Ghalme

Offline policy optimization could have a large impact on many real-world decision-making problems, as online learning may be infeasible in many applications. Importance sampling and its variants are a commonly used type of estimator in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Yao Liu , Yannis Flet-Berliac , Emma Brunskill

In many real-world settings, a centralized decision-maker must repeatedly allocate finite resources to a population over multiple time steps. Individuals who receive a resource derive some stochastic utility; to characterize the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-03 Kanad Pardeshi , Samsara Foubert , Aarti Singh

Given an initial resource allocation, where some agents may envy others or where a different distribution of resources might lead to higher social welfare, our goal is to improve the allocation without reassigning resources. We consider a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-12-15 Robert Bredereck , Andrzej Kaczmarczyk , Junjie Luo , Rolf Niedermeier , Florian Sachse