Related papers: Social Welfare in Budget Aggregation
Mechanism design for a social utility being the sum of agents' utilities (SoU) is a well-studied problem. There are, however, a number of problems of theoretical and practical interest where a designer may have a different objective than…
Budget-feasible procurement auctions play a pivotal role in various AI-driven marketplaces, such as data acquisition and crowdsourcing, where a buyer with a limited budget seeks to procure services from strategic sellers with private costs.…
We consider the problem of designing auctions which maximize consumer surplus (i.e., the social welfare minus the payments charged to the buyers). In the consumer surplus maximization problem, a seller with a set of goods faces a set of…
Approval voting is widely used for making multi-winner voting decisions. The canonical rule (also called Approval Voting) used in the setting aims to maximize social welfare by selecting candidates with the highest number of approvals. We…
Threshold policies are decision rules that assign treatments based on whether an observable characteristic exceeds a certain threshold. They are widespread across multiple domains, including welfare programs, taxation, and clinical…
As data-driven predictive models are increasingly used to inform decisions, it has been argued that decision makers should provide explanations that help individuals understand what would have to change for these decisions to be beneficial…
We study a class of procurement auctions with a budget constraint, where an auctioneer is interested in buying resources or services from a set of agents. Ideally, the auctioneer would like to select a subset of the resources so as to…
In this paper we formulate the fixed budget resource allocation game to understand the performance of a distributed market-based resource allocation system. Multiple users decide how to distribute their budget (bids) among multiple machines…
In this paper, we study multi-agent systems with decentralized resource allocations. Agents have local demand and resource supply, and are interconnected through a network designed to support sharing of the local resource; and the network…
In the classical experimental design setting, an experimenter E has access to a population of $n$ potential experiment subjects $i\in \{1,...,n\}$, each associated with a vector of features $x_i\in R^d$. Conducting an experiment with…
Large-scale online recommendation systems must facilitate the allocation of a limited number of items among competing users while learning their preferences from user feedback. As a principled way of incorporating market constraints and…
In many real-world situations, data is distributed across multiple self-interested agents. These agents can collaborate to build a machine learning model based on data from multiple agents, potentially reducing the error each experiences.…
Fair division is typically framed from a centralized perspective. However, in practice resource allocation often occurs via decentralized networks. We study a decentralized variant of fair division inspired by altruistic dynamics observed…
Congestion is a common failure mode of markets, where consumers compete inefficiently on the same subset of goods (e.g., chasing the same small set of properties on a vacation rental platform). The typical economic story is that prices…
An inconsistent knowledge base can be abstracted as a set of arguments and a defeat relation among them. There can be more than one consistent way to evaluate such an argumentation graph. Collective argument evaluation is the problem of…
We consider the challenge of AI value alignment with multiple individuals that have different reward functions and optimal policies in an underlying Markov decision process. We formalize this problem as one of policy aggregation, where the…
We study truthful mechanisms for matching and related problems in a partial information setting, where the agents' true utilities are hidden, and the algorithm only has access to ordinal preference information. Our model is motivated by the…
This paper analyzes a society composed of individuals who have diverse sets of beliefs (or models) and diverse tastes (or utility functions). It characterizes the model selection process of a social planner who wishes to aggregate…
We study how governments promote social welfare through the design of contracting environments. We model the regulation of contracting as default delegation: the government chooses a delegation set of contract terms it is willing to…
Selective rationalization has become a common mechanism to ensure that predictive models reveal how they use any available features. The selection may be soft or hard, and identifies a subset of input features relevant for prediction. The…