Related papers: Hippocratic Utility
Additive utility function models are widely used in multiple criteria decision analysis. In such models, a numerical value is associated to each alternative involved in the decision problem. It is computed by aggregating the scores of the…
We provide investment advice for an individual who wishes to minimize her lifetime poverty, with a penalty for bankruptcy or ruin. We measure poverty via a non-negative, non-increasing function of (running) wealth. Thus, the lower wealth…
The consideration of nonstandard models of the real numbers and the definition of a qualitative ordering on those models provides a generalization of the principle of maximization of expected utility. It enables the decider to assign…
A growing body of work in Ethical AI attempts to capture human moral judgments through simple computational models. The key question we address in this work is whether such simple AI models capture {the critical} nuances of moral…
Fairness in decision-making processes is often quantified using probabilistic metrics. However, these metrics may not fully capture the real-world consequences of unfairness. In this article, we adopt a utility-based approach to more…
In this position paper, we aim to spark more discussions surrounding the use of empathy as the intended outcome of many studies on immersive virtual reality experiences. As a construct, empathy has many significant flaws that may lead to…
Algorithms are increasingly used to aid, or in some cases supplant, human decision-making, particularly for decisions that hinge on predictions. As a result, two additional features in addition to prediction quality have generated interest:…
Several rules for social choice are examined from a unifying point of view that looks at them as procedures for revising a system of degrees of belief in accordance with certain specified logical constraints. Belief is here a social…
The question of "Justice" still divides social research and moral philosophy. Several Theories of Justice and conceptual approaches compete here, and distributive justice remains a major societal controversy. From an evolutionary point of…
We consider the challenge of preference elicitation in systems that help users discover the most desirable item(s) within a given database. Past work on preference elicitation focused on structured models that provide a factored…
When used in the context of decision theory, feature importance expresses how much changing the value of a feature can change the model outcome (or the utility of the outcome), compared to other features. Feature importance should not be…
The unit selection problem aims to identify a set of individuals who are most likely to exhibit a desired mode of behavior, for example, selecting individuals who would respond one way if encouraged and a different way if not encouraged.…
In financial markets valuable information is rarely circulated homogeneously, because of time required for information to spread. However, advances in communication technology means that the 'lifetime' of important information is typically…
One purpose -- quite a few thinkers would say the main purpose -- of seeking knowledge about the world is to enhance our ability to make good decisions. An item of knowledge that can make no conceivable difference with regard to anything we…
Less-salient taxes can ease the classic equality-efficiency trade-off by making people respond less to taxation. But deliberately obscuring taxes may be viewed as dishonest. This creates a three-way trade-off between equality, efficiency,…
We revisit the problem of portfolio selection, where an investor maximizes utility subject to a risk constraint. Our framework is very general and accommodates a wide range of utility and risk functionals, including non-concave utilities…
This study proposes a tractable stochastic choice model to identify motivations for prosocial behavior, and to explore alternative motivations of deliberate randomization beyond ex-ante fairness concerns. To represent social preferences, we…
Avoiding harm is an uncontroversial aim of personalized medicine and other epidemiologic initiatives. However, the precise mathematical translation of "harm" is disputable. Here we use a formal causal language to study common, but distinct,…
Goods and services -- public housing, medical appointments, schools -- are often allocated to individuals who rank them similarly but differ in their preference intensities. We characterize optimal allocation rules when individual…
This paper studies a finite-horizon portfolio selection problem with non-concave terminal utility and proportional transaction costs, in which the commonly used concavification principle for terminal value is no longer applicable. We…