Related papers: The Gatekeeping Expert's Dilemma
Applications of machine learning inform human decision makers in a broad range of tasks. The resulting problem is usually formulated in terms of a single decision maker. We argue that it should rather be described as a two-player learning…
Robotic agents that share autonomy with a human should leverage human domain knowledge and account for their preferences when completing a task. This extra knowledge can dramatically improve plan efficiency and user-satisfaction, but these…
We examine vote delegation when preferences of agents are private information. One group of agents (delegators) does not want to participate in voting and abstains under conventional voting or can delegate its votes to the other group…
In recent years, agents have become capable of communicating seamlessly via natural language and navigating in environments that involve cooperation and competition, a fact that can introduce social dilemmas. Due to the interleaving of…
In a decision-making scenario, a principal could use conditional predictions from an expert agent to inform their choice. However, this approach would introduce a fundamental conflict of interest. An agent optimizing for predictive accuracy…
We investigate a group choice problem of agents pursuing social status. We assume heterogeneous agents want to signal their private information (ability, income, patience, altruism, etc.) to others, facing tradeoff between "outside status"…
It is generally believed that in a situation where individual and collective interests are in conflict, the availability of optional participation is a key mechanism to maintain cooperation. Surprisingly, this effect is sensitive to the use…
This paper studies a game in which an informed sender with state-independent preferences uses verifiable messages to convince a receiver to choose an action from a finite set. We characterize the equilibrium outcomes of the game and compare…
What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good,…
We study the problem of an agent continuously faced with the decision of placing or not placing trust in an institution. The agent makes use of Bayesian learning in order to estimate the institution's true trustworthiness and makes the…
At face value, this essay is about understanding a fairly esoteric governance tool called compute thresholds. However, in order to grapple with whether these thresholds will achieve anything, we must first understand how they came to be. To…
People increasingly turn to conversational agents such as ChatGPT to seek guidance for their personal problems. As these systems grow in capability, many now display elements of "thinking": short reflective statements that reveal a model's…
We study the strategic aspects of social influence in a society of agents linked by a trust network, introducing a new class of games called games of influence. A game of influence is an infinite repeated game with incomplete information in…
In credence goods markets such as health care or repair services, consumers rely on experts with superior information to adequately diagnose and treat them. Experts, however, are constrained in their diagnostic abilities, which hurts market…
Algorithmic decision making is increasingly prevalent, but often vulnerable to strategic manipulation by agents seeking a favorable outcome. Prior research has shown that classifier abstention (allowing a classifier to decline making a…
Strategic classification studies the interaction between a classification rule and the strategic agents it governs. Under the assumption that the classifier is known, rational agents respond to it by manipulating their features. However, in…
This paper studies a communication game between an uninformed decision maker and two perfectly informed senders with conflicting interests. Senders can misreport information at a cost that increases with the size of the misrepresentation.…
The purpose of this white paper is to lay out the impacts of policing and gatekeeping in STEM, illustrated with lived experiences of scientists of color who are achieving despite the daunting challenges they face.
The central result of this paper is the analysis of an optimization problem which allows one to assess the limiting performance of a team of two agents who coordinate their actions. One agent is fully informed about the past and future…
Employers are concerned not only with a prospective worker's ability, but also their propensity to avoid shirking. This paper proposes a new experimental framework to study how Principals trade-off measures of ability and prosocial behavior…