Related papers: Choosing and Using Information in Evaluation Decis…

In our digital and connected societies, the development of social networks, online shopping, and reputation systems raises the question of how individuals use social information, and how it affects their decisions. We report experiments…

We study the role of information and access in capacity-constrained selection problems with fairness concerns. We develop a statistical discrimination framework, where each applicant has multiple features and is potentially strategic. The…

The recent developments of social networks and recommender systems have dramatically increased the amount of social information shared in human communities, challenging the human ability to process it. As a result, sharing aggregated forms…

Reward schemes may affect not only agents' effort, but also their incentives to gather information to reduce the riskiness of the productive activity. In a laboratory experiment using a novel task, we find that the relationship between…

Critical decisions in hiring, college admissions, and credit lending are guided by predictions made in the presence of uncertainty. While uncertainty imparts errors across all demographic groups, this paper shows that the types of errors…

In decision-making, individuals often rely on intuition, which can occasionally yield suboptimal outcomes. This study examines the impact of intuitive decision-making on individuals who are confronted with limited position information in…

Individual and social biases undermine the effectiveness of human advisers by inducing judgment errors which can disadvantage protected groups. In this paper, we study the influence these biases can have in the pervasive problem of fake…

Selective recruitment designs preferentially recruit individuals that are estimated to be statistically informative onto a clinical trial. Individuals that are expected to contribute less information have a lower probability of recruitment.…

A major problem that resulted from the massive use of social media networks is the diffusion of incorrect information. However, very few studies have investigated the impact of incorrect information on individual and collective decisions.…

Cognitive biases are widespread in humans and animals alike, and can sometimes be reinforced by social interactions. One prime bias in judgment and decision-making is the human tendency to underestimate large quantities. Previous research…

Normative models are often used to describe how humans and animals make decisions. These models treat deliberation as the accumulation of uncertain evidence that terminates with a commitment to a choice. When extended to social groups, such…

An agent has access to multiple information sources, each of which provides information about a different attribute of an unknown state. Information is acquired continuously -- where the agent chooses both which sources to sample from, and…

Biases with respect to socially-salient attributes of individuals have been well documented in evaluation processes used in settings such as admissions and hiring. We view such an evaluation process as a transformation of a distribution of…

The strategy for selecting candidate sets -- the set of items that the recommendation system is expected to rank for each user -- is an important decision in carrying out an offline top-$N$ recommender system evaluation. The set of…

Public and private institutions must often allocate scare resources under uncertainty. Banks, for example, extend credit to loan applicants based in part on their estimated likelihood of repaying a loan. But when the quality of information…

Decisions are often made by heterogeneous groups of individuals, each with distinct initial biases and access to information of different quality. We show that in large groups of independent agents who accumulate evidence the first to…

The recent trend for acquiring big data assumes that possessing quantitatively more and qualitatively finer data necessarily provides an advantage that may be critical in competitive situations. Using a model complex adaptive system where…

In the setting where a group of agents is asked a single subjective multi-choice question (e.g. which one do you prefer? cat or dog?), we are interested in evaluating the quality of the collected feedback. However, the collected statistics…

Assessments such as standardized tests and teacher evaluations of students' classroom participation are central elements of most educational systems. Assessments inform the student, parent, teacher, and school about the student learning…

Collaborative information serves as the cornerstone of recommender systems which typically focus on capturing it from user-item interactions to deliver personalized services. However, current understanding of this crucial resource remains…