Related papers: Opportunity-Sensitive Social Welfare
This paper develops a model of in-kind redistribution where consumers participate in either a private market or a government-designed program, but not both. We characterize when a social planner, seeking to maximize weighted total surplus,…
As society transitions towards an AI-based decision-making infrastructure, an ever-increasing number of decisions once under control of humans are now delegated to automated systems. Even though such developments make various parts of…
This paper introduces marginal fairness, a new individual fairness notion for equitable decision-making in the presence of protected attributes such as gender, race, and religion. This criterion ensures that decisions based on generalized…
The paper starts with a brief review of present understanding of income distributions; especially with regard to recent work in the field of econophysics that draws parallels between income, wealth and energy distributions. Examples of…
Policymakers often face the decision of how to allocate resources across many different policies using noisy estimates of policy impacts. This paper develops a framework for optimal policy choices under statistical uncertainty. I consider a…
Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that perspective-taking can be relatively effortful. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate…
A common objective in mechanism design is to choose the outcome (for example, allocation of resources) that maximizes the sum of the agents' valuations, without introducing incentives for agents to misreport their preferences. The class of…
We propose a criterion for discrimination against a specified sensitive attribute in supervised learning, where the goal is to predict some target based on available features. Assuming data about the predictor, target, and membership in the…
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…
A variety of fairness constraints have been proposed in the literature to mitigate group-level statistical bias. Their impacts have been largely evaluated for different groups of populations corresponding to a set of sensitive attributes,…
In the so-called ``fair'' models of peer-to-peer wealth exchanges, economic inequality tends to reach its maximum value asymptotically. This global trend is evident as the richest continuously accumulate a larger share of wealth at the…
Income inequality is known to have negative impacts on an economic system, thus has been debated for a hundred years past or more. Numerous ideas have been proposed to quantify income inequality, and the Gini coefficient is a prevalent…
Substantial empirical research has shown that the level of individualism vs. collectivism is one of the most critical and important determinants of societal traits, such as economic growth, economic institutions and health conditions. But…
We consider the social welfare function a la Arrow, where some voters are not qualified to evaluate some alternatives. Thus, the inputs of the social welfare function are the preferences of voters on the alternatives that they are qualified…
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…
We develop new robust discrete choice tools to learn about the average willingness to pay for a price subsidy and its effects on demand given exogenous, discrete variation in prices. Our starting point is a nonparametric, nonseparable model…
Statistical parity metrics have been widely studied and endorsed in the AI community as a means of achieving fairness, but they suffer from at least two weaknesses. They disregard the actual welfare consequences of decisions and may…
We analyze demand settings where heterogeneous consumers maximize utility for product attributes subject to a nonlinear budget constraint. We develop nonparametric methods for welfare-analysis of interventions that change the constraint.…
We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among agents that have an identical subadditive valuation over the goods. The extent of fairness and efficiency of allocations is measured by the generalized means of the values that the…
We propose an equilibrium interaction model of occupational segregation and labor market inequality between two social groups, generated exclusively through the documented tendency to refer informal job seekers of identical "social color".…