Related papers: All Substitution Is Local
Pricing decisions of companies require an understanding of the causal effect of a price change on the demand. When real-life pricing experiments are infeasible, data-driven decision-making must be based on alternative data sources such as…
Firms that price perishable resources -- airline seats, hotel rooms, seasonal inventory -- now routinely use demand predictions, but these predictions vary widely in quality. Under hard capacity constraints, acting on an inaccurate…
We study opinion dynamics in a population of interacting adaptive agents voting on a set of complex multidimensional issues. We consider agents which can classify issues into for or against. The agents arrive at the opinions about each…
Substitute relationships are fundamental to people's daily lives across various domains. This study aims to comprehend and predict substitute relationships among products in diverse fields, extensively analyzing the application of machine…
This paper modifies Jaynes's axioms of plausible reasoning and derives the minimum relative entropy principle, Bayes's rule, as well as maximum likelihood from first principles. The new axioms, which I call the Optimum Information…
This paper considers the problem of localising a stationary signal source using a team of mobile agents which only take binary measurements. Background false detection rates and missed detection probabilities are incorporated into the…
The information describing the conditions of a system or a person is constantly evolving and may become obsolete and contradict other information. A database, therefore, must be consistently updated upon the acquisition of new valid…
An information cascade is a circumstance where agents make decisions in a sequential fashion by following other agents. Bikhchandani et al., predict that once a cascade starts it continues, even if it is wrong, until agents receive an…
The Bayesian persuasion model studies communication between an informed sender and a receiver with a payoff-relevant action, emphasizing the ability of a sender to extract maximal surplus from his informational advantage. In this paper we…
Logarithmic score and information divergence appear in information theory, statistics, statistical mechanics, and portfolio theory. We demonstrate that all these topics involve some kind of optimization that leads directly to regret…
Bayesian optimization is a coherent, ubiquitous approach to decision-making under uncertainty, with applications including multi-arm bandits, active learning, and black-box optimization. Bayesian optimization selects decisions (i.e.…
An important issue in concurrency is interference. This issue manifests itself in both shared-variable and communication-based concurrency --- this paper focusses on the former case where interference is caused by the environment of a…
Background: Confirmation bias is the tendency to acquire or evaluate new information in a way that is consistent with one's preexisting beliefs. It is omnipresent in psychology, economics, and even scientific practices. Prior theoretical…
Explanations are well-known to improve recommender systems' transparency. These explanations may be local, explaining an individual recommendation, or global, explaining the recommender model in general. Despite their widespread use, there…
We propose a collective opinion formation model with a so-called confirmation bias. The confirmation bias is a psychological effect with which, in the context of opinion formation, an individual in favor of an opinion is prone to…
Referring is one of the most basic and prevalent uses of language. How do speakers choose from the wealth of referring expressions at their disposal? Rational theories of language use have come under attack for decades for not being able to…
We study a setting where Bayesian agents with a common prior have private information related to an event's outcome and sequentially make public announcements relating to their information. Our main result shows that when agents' private…
We introduce a socially motivated extension of the voter model in which individual voters are also influenced by two opposing, fixed-opinion news sources. These sources forestall consensus and instead drive the population to a politically…
Unobserved confounding is one of the main challenges when estimating causal effects. We propose a causal reduction method that, given a causal model, replaces an arbitrary number of possibly high-dimensional latent confounders with a single…
A decision-maker periodically acquires information about a changing state, controlling both the timing and content of updates. I characterize optimal policies using a decomposition of the dynamic problem into optimal stopping and static…