Related papers: Statistical Bounds on Equity
We consider social resource allocations that deliver an array of scarce supports to a diverse population. Such allocations pervade social service delivery, such as provision of homeless services, assignment of refugees to cities, among…
Redistribution of resources within a group as a method to reduce wealth inequality is a current area of debate. The evolutionary path to or away from wealth sharing is also a subject of active research. In order to investigate effects and…
The relationship of policy choice by majority voting and by maximization of utilitarian welfare has long been discussed. I consider choice between a status quo and a proposed policy when persons have interpersonally comparable cardinal…
The problem of assigning probabilities when little is known is analized in the case where the quanities of interest are physical observables, i.e. can be measured and their values expressed by numbers. It is pointed out that the assignment…
For a probability distribution $P$ on an at most countable alphabet $\mathcal A$, this article gives finite sample bounds for the expected occupancy counts $\mathbb E K_{n,r}$ and probabilities $\mathbb E M_{n,r}$. Both upper and lower…
An equation for the evolution of the distribution of wealth in a population of economic agents making binary transactions with a constant total amount of "money" has recently been proposed by one of us (RLR). This equation takes the form of…
Take a look around you -- in your family, your school or workplace, in the streets, and you see boys & girls in about equal proportion, and without any easily visible gender patterns in case of siblings. So, to the famous first order of…
According to the proportional allocation mechanism from the network optimization literature, users compete for a divisible resource -- such as bandwidth -- by submitting bids. The mechanism allocates to each user a fraction of the resource…
We present a simplified model for the exploitation of finite resources by interacting agents, where each agent receives a random fraction of the available resources. An extremal dynamics ensures that the poorest agent has a chance to change…
Given an initial resource allocation, where some agents may envy others or where a different distribution of resources might lead to higher social welfare, our goal is to improve the allocation without reassigning resources. We consider a…
We present a generalization of the maximal inequalities that upper bound the expectation of the maximum of $n$ jointly distributed random variables. We control the expectation of a randomly selected random variable from $n$ jointly…
General equilibrium equations in economics play the same role with many-body Newtonian equations in physics. Accordingly, each solution of the general equilibrium equations can be regarded as a possible microstate of the economic system.…
In order to describe the properties of the observed distribution of wealth in a population, most economic models rely on the existence of an asymptotic equilibrium state. In addition, the process generating the equilibrium distribution is…
Empirical research shows that individuals' responses to treatments vary along latent characteristics, such as innate ability or motivation. Therefore, a policymaker seeking to maximize welfare may consider designing policies based on…
Consider an unobservable $M|G|1$ queue with preemptive-resume scheduling and two priority classes. Customers are strategic and may join the premium class for a fee. We analyze the resulting equilibrium outcomes, equilibrium stability, and…
The problem of how to allocate to states the seats in the US House of Representatives is the most studied instance of what is termed the `apportionment problem'. We propose a new method of apportionment which is stochastic, which meets the…
A computational model for the distribution of wealth among the members of an ideal society is presented. It is determined that a realistic distribution of wealth depends upon two mechanisms: an asymmetric flux of wealth in trading…
We introduce methods to bound the mean of a discrete distribution (or finite population) based on sample data, for random variables with a known set of possible values. In particular, the methods can be applied to categorical data with…
Many policies allocate harms or benefits that are uncertain in nature: they produce distributions over the population in which individuals have different probabilities of incurring harm or benefit. Comparing different policies thus involves…
A simple mechanism for allocating indivisible resources is sequential allocation in which agents take turns to pick items. We focus on possible and necessary allocation problems, checking whether allocations of a given form occur in some or…