Related papers: Gatekeeping, Selection, and Welfare
In search engines, online marketplaces and other human-computer interfaces large collectives of individuals sequentially interact with numerous alternatives of varying quality. In these contexts, trial and error (exploration) is crucial for…
We study the problem of screening in decision-making processes under uncertainty, focusing on the impact of adding an additional screening stage, commonly known as a 'gatekeeper.' While our primary analysis is rooted in the context of job…
Recessions are periods in which the least productive firms in the economy exit, and as the economy recovers, they are replaced by new and more productive entrants. These cleansing effects improve the average firm productivity. At the same…
We study one-sided matching problems where $n$ agents have preferences over $m$ objects and each of them need to be assigned to at most one object. Most work on such problems assume that the agents only have ordinal preferences and usually…
Congestion is a common failure mode of markets, where consumers compete inefficiently on the same subset of goods (e.g., chasing the same small set of properties on a vacation rental platform). The typical economic story is that prices…
Congestion externalities are a well-known phenomenon in transportation and communication networks, healthcare etc. Optimization by self-interested agents in such settings typically results in equilibria which are sub-optimal for social…
Incomplete take-up of welfare benefits remains a major policy puzzle. This paper decomposes the causes of incomplete welfare take-up into two mechanisms: inattention, where households do not consider program participation, and active…
Sequential allocation is a simple and attractive mechanism for the allocation of indivisible goods. Agents take turns, according to a policy, to pick items. Sequential allocation is guaranteed to return an allocation which is efficient but…
We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred.…
Recently, machine learning algorithms have successfully entered large-scale real-world industrial applications (e.g. search engines and email spam filters). Here, the CPU cost during test time must be budgeted and accounted for. In this…
Institutional crossing platforms face a hidden-information problem: investors value trades as portfolios, but liquidity discovery is typically organized around individual securities. We model portfolio crossing as limited-communication…
Welfare economics relies on access to agents' utility functions: we revisit classical questions in welfare economics, assuming access to data on agents' past choices instead of their utilities. Our main result considers the existence of…
To choose between two discrete goods, a consumer pays attention to only those with prices below a threshold. From these, she chooses her most preferred good. We assume consumers in a population have the same preference but may have…
We introduce the problem of assigning resources to improve their utilization. The motivation comes from settings where agents have uncertainty about their own values for using a resource, and where it is in the interest of a group that…
This paper studies the efficiency of battery storage operations in electricity markets by comparing the social welfare gain achieved by a central planner to that of a decentralized profit-maximizing operator. The problem is formulated in a…
Selective contests can impair participants' overall welfare in overcompetitive environments, such as school admissions. This paper models the situation as an optimal contest design problem with binary actions, treating effort costs as…
Intrusion Detection is an invaluable part of computer networks defense. An important consideration is the fact that raising false alarms carries a significantly lower cost than not detecting at- tacks. For this reason, we examine how…
In a two-stage model of choice a decision maker first shortlists a given menu and then applies her preferences. We show that a sizeable class of these models run into significant issues in terms of identification of preferences…
In the current intensively changing technological environment, wireless network operators try to manage the increase of global traffic, optimizing the use of the available resources. This involves associating each user to one of its…
Central to privacy concerns is that firms may use consumer data to price discriminate. A common policy response is that consumers should be given control over which firms access their data and how. Since firms learn about a consumer's…