Related papers: Gatekeeping, Selection, and Welfare
We analyze the problem of learning a single user's preferences in an active learning setting, sequentially and adaptively querying the user over a finite time horizon. Learning is conducted via choice-based queries, where the user selects…
Cross Entropy (CE) has an important role in machine learning and, in particular, in neural networks. It is commonly used in neural networks as the cost between the known distribution of the label and the Softmax/Sigmoid output. In this…
Existing research on the static effects of the manipulation of welfare program benefit parameters on labor supply has allowed only restrictive forms of heterogeneity in preferences. Yet preference heterogeneity implies that the marginal…
We present a model of competition between web search algorithms, and study the impact of such competition on user welfare. In our model, search providers compete for customers by strategically selecting which search results to display in…
Inspired by natural evolution, evolutionary search algorithms have proven remarkably capable due to their dual abilities to radiantly explore through diverse populations and to converge to adaptive pressures. A large part of this behavior…
In multi-agent environments in which coordination is desirable, the history of play often causes lock-in at sub-optimal outcomes. Notoriously, technologies with a significant environmental footprint or high social cost persist despite the…
Portfolio Selection is an important real-world financial task and has attracted extensive attention in artificial intelligence communities. This task, however, has two main difficulties: (i) the non-stationary price series and complex asset…
Determining consumer preferences and utility is a foundational challenge in economics. They are central in determining consumer behaviour through the utility-maximising consumer decision-making process. However, preferences and utilities…
Most products are produced and sold by supply chain networks, where an interconnected network of producers and intermediaries set prices to maximize their profits. I show that there exists a unique equilibrium in a price-setting game on a…
In real-world classification settings, such as loan application evaluation or content moderation on online platforms, individuals respond to classifier predictions by strategically updating their features to increase their likelihood of…
The differentially private (DP) facility location problem seeks to determine a socially optimal placement for a public facility while ensuring that each participating agent's location remains private. To privatize its input data, a DP…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process for allocating funds to projects based on the votes of members of the community. Different rules have been used to aggregate participants' votes. Past research has studied the trade-off…
This paper proposes a novel framework to price energy storage in economic dispatch with a social welfare maximization objective. This framework can be utilized by power system operators to generate default bids for storage or to benchmark…
We investigate a model of sequential decision-making where a single alternative is chosen at each round. We focus on two objectives -- utilitarian welfare (Util) and egalitarian welfare (Egal) -- and consider the computational complexity of…
We embed observational learning (BHW) in a symmetric duopoly with random arrivals and search frictions. With fixed posted prices, a mixed-strategy pricing equilibrium exists and yields price dispersion even with ex-ante identical firms. We…
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
This article expands Milton Friedman's spending matrix to analyse 'spending efficiency' and 'preference compatibility' across different economic systems against five key outcome criteria. By generalising Friedman's typology, it compares…
We develop new robust discrete choice tools to learn about the average willingness to pay for a price subsidy and its effects on demand given exogenous, discrete variation in prices. Our starting point is a nonparametric, nonseparable model…
The ability to make decisions and to assess potential courses of action is a corner-stone of many AI applications, and usually this requires explicit information about the decision-maker s preferences. IN many applications, preference…
Motivated by applications such as college admission and insurance rate determination, we propose an evaluation problem where the inputs are controlled by strategic individuals who can modify their features at a cost. A learner can only…