Related papers: Gatekeeping, Selection, and Welfare
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…
In real-world search, recommendation, and advertising systems, the multi-stage ranking architecture is commonly adopted. Such architecture usually consists of matching, pre-ranking, ranking, and re-ranking stages. In the pre-ranking stage,…
Industries can enter one country first, and then enter its neighbors' markets. Firms in the industry can expand trade network through the export behavior of other firms in the industry. If a firm is dependent on a few foreign markets, the…
Optimal shelflisting invites profit maximization to become sensitive to the ways in which purchasing decisions are order-dependent. We study the computational complexity of the corresponding product arrangement problem when consumers are…
A principal decides whether to approve an agent based on a noisy signal (e.g., test scores) generated by the agent. High-quality agents can produce high signals on average at lower cost, but the realizations are subject to noise that…
Reward functions are easy to misspecify; although designers can make corrections after observing mistakes, an agent pursuing a misspecified reward function can irreversibly change the state of its environment. If that change precludes…
Data regulations increasingly enable consumers to switch among market segments, making segmentation an endogenous outcome of strategic interaction. We study a model in which consumers choose segments before a monopolist sets…
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…
As the scale of machine learning models increases, trends such as scaling laws anticipate consistent downstream improvements in predictive accuracy. However, these trends take the perspective of a single model-provider in isolation, while…
To determine the welfare implications of price changes in demand data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that the absence of cycles in this relation characterizes a consumer who trades off the utility of…
This paper develops theoretical criteria and econometric methods to rank policy interventions in terms of welfare when individuals are loss-averse. Our new criterion for "loss aversion-sensitive dominance" defines a weak partial ordering of…
Information policies such as scores, ratings, and recommendations are increasingly shaping society's choices in high-stakes domains. We provide a framework to study the welfare implications of information policies on a population of…
This paper introduces ICET, a new algorithm for cost-sensitive classification. ICET uses a genetic algorithm to evolve a population of biases for a decision tree induction algorithm. The fitness function of the genetic algorithm is the…
Category-based coordination mechanisms allocate resources by mapping a declared service category to a fixed resource profile, without observing individual demand types. We establish three results for this class of mechanisms. First, the…
This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of welfare measures when oligopolistic firms face multiple policy interventions and external changes under general forms of market demands, production costs, and imperfect competition. We present…
Price controls kill the incentive for arbitrage. We prove a Chaos Theorem: under a binding price ceiling, suppliers are indifferent across destinations, so arbitrarily small cost differences can determine the entire allocation. The economy…
Preferential Bayesian optimization allows optimization of objectives that are either expensive or difficult to measure directly, by relying on a minimal number of comparative evaluations done by a human expert. Generating candidate…
This paper presents analytical techniques to improve redundancy and relevance assessment for precise selection of features in practical multi-class raw datasets. We propose a matrix-rank based $k$-medoids algorithm that guarantees to output…
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…
In various markets where sellers compete in price, price oscillations are observed rather than convergence to equilibrium. Such fluctuations have been empirically observed in the retail market for gasoline, in airline pricing and in the…