Related papers: Social Welfare in Budget Aggregation
This paper studies delegation in a model of discrete choice. In the delegation problem, an uninformed principal must consult an informed agent to make a decision. Both the agent and principal have preferences over the decided-upon action…
We study the problem of allocating multiple types of resources to agents with Leontief preferences. The classic Dominant Resource Fairness (DRF) mechanism satisfies several desired fairness and incentive properties, but is known to have…
We study one-sided matching problems where $n$ agents have preferences over $m$ objects and each of them need to be assigned to at most one object. Most work on such problems assume that the agents only have ordinal preferences and usually…
We study non-monetary mechanisms for the fair and efficient allocation of reusable public resources, i.e., resources used for varying durations. We consider settings where a limited resource is repeatedly shared among a set of agents, each…
The focus of classic mechanism design has been on truthful direct-revelation mechanisms. In the context of combinatorial auctions the truthful direct-revelation mechanism that maximizes social welfare is the VCG mechanism. For many…
We study fair mechanisms for the classic job scheduling problem on unrelated machines with the objective of minimizing the makespan. This problem is equivalent to minimizing the egalitarian social cost in the fair division of chores. The…
We study a temporal voting model where voters have dynamic preferences over a set of public chores -- projects that benefit society, but impose individual costs on those affected by their implementation. We investigate the computational…
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…
Social utility maximization refers to the process of allocating resources in such a way that the sum of agents' utilities is maximized under the system constraints. Such allocation arises in several problems in the general area of…
We study allocation mechanisms that utilize costly signaling as a screening tool. A social planner aims to maximize social welfare, defined as the weighted sum of agents' utilities, while implementing a specific allocation rule. Within a…
Sequential allocation is a simple and attractive mechanism for the allocation of indivisible goods. Agents take turns, according to a policy, to pick items. Sequential allocation is guaranteed to return an allocation which is efficient but…
This paper revisits the classic instrument choice problem in a setting with consumption externalities, through the lens of robust mechanism design. A regulator can implement any incentive-compatible policy but is uncertain about how…
We consider the egalitarian welfare aspects of random assignment mechanisms when agents have unrestricted cardinal utilities over the objects. We give bounds on how well different random assignment mechanisms approximate the optimal…
A rapidly growing literature on lying in behavioral economics and psychology shows that individuals often do not lie even when lying maximizes their utility. In this work, we attempt to incorporate these findings into the theory of…
Decades of research in machine learning have given us powerful tools for making accurate predictions. But when used in social settings and on human inputs, better accuracy does not immediately translate to better social outcomes. To…
We study resource allocation in two-sided markets from a fundamental perspective and introduce a general modeling and algorithmic framework to effectively incorporate the complex and multidimensional aspects of fairness. Our main technical…
The broad concept of an individual's welfare is actually a cluster of related specific concepts that bear a "family resemblance" to one another. One might care about how a policy will affect people both in terms of their subjective…
When users access shared resources in a selfish manner, the resulting societal cost and perceived users' cost is often higher than what would result from a centrally coordinated optimal allocation. While several contributions in mechanism…
Selective contests can impair participants' overall welfare in overcompetitive environments, such as school admissions. This paper models the situation as an optimal contest design problem with binary actions, treating effort costs as…
We study no-money mechanisms for allocating indivisible items to strategic agents with additive preferences under a stochastic model. In this model, items' values are drawn from an underlying distribution and mechanisms are evaluated with…