Related papers: Opportunity-Sensitive Social Welfare
In a two-stage model of choice a decision maker first shortlists a given menu and then applies her preferences. We show that a sizeable class of these models run into significant issues in terms of identification of preferences…
Scoring systems, as a type of predictive model, have significant advantages in interpretability and transparency and facilitate quick decision-making. As such, scoring systems have been extensively used in a wide variety of industries such…
Biases with respect to socially-salient attributes of individuals have been well documented in evaluation processes used in settings such as admissions and hiring. We view such an evaluation process as a transformation of a distribution of…
Is it possible to understand or imitate a policy maker's rationale by looking at past decisions they made? We formalize this question as the problem of learning social welfare functions belonging to the well-studied family of power mean…
Opportunities, such as access to education or family background, shape income inequality by influencing the chances of economic success. Unequal opportunities create uncertainty about whether success is merit- or luck-based. We examine how…
Based on the observation that many existing discrete choice models admit a welfare function of utilities whose gradient gives the choice probability vector, we propose a new representation of discrete choice model which we call the…
In this work, we propose an axiomatic approach for measuring the performance/welfare of a system consisting of concurrent agents in a resource-driven system. Our approach provides a unifying view on popular system optimality principles,…
In this paper, we consider the problem of fair division of indivisible goods when the allocation of goods impacts society. Specifically, we introduce a second valuation function for each agent, determining the social impact of allocating a…
We develop a general framework to analyze the distribution functions of wealth and income. Within this framework we study wealth distribution in a society by using a model which turns on two-party trading for poor people while for rich…
Using both single-index measures and stochastic dominance concepts, we show how Bayesian inference can be used to make multivariate welfare comparisons. A four-dimensional distribution for the well-being attributes income, mental health,…
Income inequality and redistribution policies are modeled with a minimal, endogenous model of a simple foraging economy. Significant income inequalities emerge from the model for populations of equally capable individuals presented with…
Research on promoting cooperation among autonomous, self-regarding agents has often focused on the bi-objective optimisation problem: minimising the total incentive cost while maximising the frequency of cooperation. However, the optimal…
A mathematical model of measurement of the perception of well-being for groups with increasing incomes, but proportionally unequal is proposed. Assuming that welfare grows with own income and decreases with relative inequality (income of…
Most social choice rules assume access to full rankings, while current alignment practice -- despite aiming for diversity -- typically treats voters as anonymous and comparisons as independent, effectively extracting only about one bit per…
This paper introduces metrics for welfare analysis in dynamic models. We develop estimation and inference for these parameters even in the presence of a high-dimensional state space. Examples of welfare metrics include average welfare,…
We provide sufficient conditions for semi-nonparametric point identification of a mixture model of decision making under risk, when agents make choices in multiple lines of insurance coverage (contexts) by purchasing a bundle. As a first…
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 studies identification and inference of the welfare gain that results from switching from one policy (such as the status quo policy) to another policy. The welfare gain is not point identified in general when data are obtained…
We propose a highly schematic economic model in which, in some cases, wage inequalities lead to higher overall social welfare. This is due to the fact that high earners can consume low productivity, non essential products, which allows…
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…