Related papers: Statistical Bounds on Equity
Many high-stakes AI deployments proceed only if every stakeholder deems the system acceptable relative to their own minimum standard. With randomization over a finite menu of options, this becomes a feasibility question: does there exist a…
When facing many options, we narrow down our focus to very few of them. Although behaviors like this can be a sign of heuristics, they can actually be optimal under limited cognitive resources. Here we study the problem of how to optimally…
Parametric inference posits a statistical model that is a specified family of probability distributions. Restricted inference, e.g., restricted likelihood ratio testing, attempts to exploit the structure of a statistical submodel that is a…
We consider item allocation to individual agents who have additive valuations, in settings in which there are protected groups, and the allocation needs to give each protected group its "fair" share of the total welfare. Informally, within…
We introduce a general approach based on \emph{selective verification} and obtain approximate mechanisms without money for maximizing the social welfare in the general domain of utilitarian voting. Having a good allocation in mind, a…
We propose a notion of fairness for allocation problems in which different agents may have different reservation utilities, stemming from different outside options, or property rights. Fairness is usually understood as the absence of envy,…
Discrimination in machine learning often arises along multiple dimensions (a.k.a. protected attributes); it is then desirable to ensure \emph{intersectional fairness} -- i.e., that no subgroup is discriminated against. It is known that…
This paper investigates the emergence of wealth inequality through a minimalist kinetic exchange model that incorporates two fundamental economic features: fixed-amount transactions and hard budget constraints. In contrast to the maximum…
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.…
This paper reframes approachability theory within the context of population games. Thus, whilst one player aims at driving her average payoff to a predefined set, her opponent is not malevolent but rather extracted randomly from a…
By using stochastic analysis, two probability versions of Li-Yau type inequalities are established for diffusion semigroups on a manifold possibly with (non-convex) boundary. The inequalities are explicitly given by the Bakry-Emery…
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
This Chapter reviews statistical models for the probability distribution of money developed in the econophysics literature since the late 1990s. In these models, economic transactions are modeled as random transfers of money between the…
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…
In statistical mechanics, measuring the number of available states and their probabilities, and thus the system's entropy, enables the prediction of the macroscopic properties of a physical system at equilibrium. This predictive capacity…
How can we limit wealth disparities while stimulating economic flows in sustainable societies? To examine the link between these concepts, we propose an econophysics asset exchange model with the surplus stock of the wealthy. The wealthy…
In the design and analysis of revenue-maximizing auctions, auction performance is typically measured with respect to a prior distribution over inputs. The most obvious source for such a distribution is past data. The goal is to understand…
In simulations of some economic gas-like models, the asymptotic regime shows an exponential wealth distribution, independently of the initial wealth distribution given to the system. The appearance of this statistical equilibrium for this…
In observational studies of discrimination, the most common statistical approaches consider either the rate at which decisions are made (benchmark tests) or the success rate of those decisions (outcome tests). Both tests, however, have…
A common assumption of political economy is that profit rates across firms or sectors tend to uniformity, and often models are formulated in which this tendency is assumed to have been realised. But in reality this tendency is never…