Related papers: Ranking Policies Under Loss Aversion and Inequalit…
Behavioural economics provides labels for patterns in human economic behaviour. Probability weighting is one such label. It expresses a mismatch between probabilities used in a formal model of a decision (i.e. model parameters) and…
This paper investigates a novel behavioral feature of recursive preferences: aversion to risks that persist over time, or simply \textit{correlation aversion}. Greater persistence provides information about future consumption but reduces…
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…
Individuals often navigate several options with incomplete knowledge of their own preferences. Information provisioning tools such as public rankings and personalized recommendations have become central to helping individuals make choices,…
The question of how people vote strategically under uncertainty has attracted much attention in several disciplines. Theoretical decision models have been proposed which vary in their assumptions on the sophistication of the voters and on…
The relationship of policy choice by majority voting and by maximization of utilitarian welfare has long been discussed. I consider choice between a status quo and a proposed policy when persons have interpersonally comparable cardinal…
While enforcing egalitarian social norms is critical for human society, punishing social norm violators often incurs a cost to the self. This cost looms even larger when one can benefit from an unequal distribution of resources (i.e.…
A tailor-made internet survey experiment provides individuals with information on their income positions to examine their effects on subjective well-being. In the first survey, respondents were asked about their household income and…
Evaluating the causal impacts of possible interventions is crucial for informing decision-making, especially towards improving access to opportunity. However, if causal effects are heterogeneous and predictable from covariates, personalized…
Agents often have individual goals which depend on a group's actions. If agents trust a forecast of collective action and adapt strategically, such prediction can influence outcomes non-trivially, resulting in a form of performative…
We study the welfare structure in two-sided large random matching markets. In the model, each agent has a latent personal score for every agent on the other side of the market and her preferences follow a logit model based on these scores.…
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…
I study altruistic choices through the lens of a cognitively noisy decision-maker. I introduce a theoretical framework that demonstrates how increased cognitive noise can directionally affect altruistic decisions and put its implications to…
Practitioners often use data from a randomized controlled trial to learn a treatment assignment policy that can be deployed on a target population. A recurring concern in doing so is that, even if the randomized trial was well-executed…
Rankings of people and items has been highly used in selection-making, match-making, and recommendation algorithms that have been deployed on ranging of platforms from employment websites to searching tools. The ranking position of a…
We develop new experimental paradigms for measuring welfare in language models. We compare verbal reports of models about their preferences with preferences expressed through behavior when navigating a virtual environment and selecting…
Decisions taken in our everyday lives are based on a wide variety of information so it is generally very difficult to assess what are the strategies that guide us. Stock market therefore provides a rich environment to study how people take…
We design and implement lab experiments to evaluate the normative appeal of behavior arising from models of ambiguity-averse preferences. We report two main empirical findings. First, we demonstrate that behavior reflects an incomplete…
Two decades of U.S. government legislative outcomes, as well as the policy preferences of rich people, the general population, and diverse interest groups, were captured in a detailed dataset curated and analyzed by Gilens, Page et al.…
Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning agents can develop policies that exploit spurious correlations between rewards and observations. This phenomenon, known as policy confounding, arises because the agent's policy influences…