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There are many economic contexts where the productivity and welfare performance of institutions and policies depend on who matches with whom. Examples include caseworkers and job seekers in job search assistance programs, medical doctors…
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.…
Different models to study the wealth distribution in an artificial society have considered a transactional dynamics as the driving force. Those models include a risk aversion factor, but also a finite probability of favoring the poorer…
Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…
We draw attention to an important, yet largely overlooked aspect of evaluating fairness for automated decision making systems---namely risk and welfare considerations. Our proposed family of measures corresponds to the long-established…
This work contributes to a foundational question in economic theory: how do individual-level cognitive biases interact with collective choice mechanisms? We study a setting where voters hold intrinsic preference rankings over a set of…
Income inequality and redistribution policies are modeled with a minimal, endogenous model of a simple foraging economy. Significant income inequalities emerge from the model for populations of equally capable individuals presented with…
Policymakers often face the decision of how to allocate resources across many different policies using noisy estimates of policy impacts. This paper develops a framework for optimal policy choices under statistical uncertainty. I consider a…
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…
Iterative voting is a natural model of repeated strategic decision-making in social choice theory when agents have the opportunity to update their votes prior to finalizing the group decision. Prior work has analyzed the efficacy of…
Policy makers need to decide whether to treat or not to treat heterogeneous individuals. The optimal treatment choice depends on the welfare function that the policy maker has in mind and it is referred to as the policy learning problem. I…
The definition of preferences assigned to individuals is a concept that concerns many disciplines, from economics, with the search of an acceptable outcome for an ensemble of individuals, to decision making an analysis of vote systems. We…
A researcher allocates a budget of informative tests across multiple unknown attributes to influence a decision-maker. We derive the researcher's equilibrium learning strategy by solving an auxiliary single-player problem. The attribute…
People are often reluctant to sell a house, or shares of stock, below the price at which they originally bought it. While this is generally not consistent with rational utility maximization, it does reflect two strong empirical regularities…
This paper studies algorithmic decision-making in the presence of strategic individual behaviors, where an ML model is used to make decisions about human agents and the latter can adapt their behavior strategically to improve their future…
We analyze and quantify, in a financial market with parameter uncertainty and for a Constant Relative Risk Aversion investor, the utility effects of two different boundedly rational (i.e., sub-optimal) investment strategies (namely, myopic…
Medical "Crisis Standards of Care" call for a utilitarian allocation of scarce resources in emergencies, while favoring the worst-off under normal conditions. Inspired by such triage rules, we introduce social welfare functions whose…
Rankings have become the primary interface in two-sided online markets. Many have noted that the rankings not only affect the satisfaction of the users (e.g., customers, listeners, employers, travelers), but that the position in the ranking…
A customized internet survey experiment is conducted in Japan to examine how individuals' relative income position influences preferences for income redistribution and individual perceptions regarding income tax burden. I first asked…
An important use of machine learning is to learn what people value. What posts or photos should a user be shown? Which jobs or activities would a person find rewarding? In each case, observations of people's past choices can inform our…