Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Wichinpong Park Sinchaisri

Publications and source records attributed to Wichinpong Park Sinchaisri.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Strategic Advice in the Age of Personal AI

Personal AI assistants are changing how individuals use advice. We study how an advisor should design its recommendation in anticipation of stochastic consultation with personal AI whose recommendation is predictable. Personal AI enters through two dimensions: consultation probability and relative trust, which captures the relative influence personal AI receives when consulted. In the baseline model, the advisor optimally counteracts the personal AI signal. Counteraction increases with consultation probability but is hump-shaped in relative trust. The advisor's minimized loss is hump-shaped in consultation probability, vanishing when personal AI is never or always consulted. Greater relative trust in personal AI increases the irreducible loss arising from stochastic consultation. We extend the analysis to partial predictability and costly recommendation adjustment, characterizing their effects on optimal recommendations and minimized loss. The framework also accommodates richer information structures, including settings in which personal AI is perceived as having access to private information relevant to the task. We introduce an online forecasting experiment that examines how participants obtain personal AI advice and combine it with an advisor's recommendation and their initial judgments. Participants place weight on all three inputs. When access requires an additional action, some participants do not seek personal AI advice, while some others attempt to obtain it without success. Together, these findings highlight two distinct aspects of personal AI use: whether advice is obtained and how much weight it receives when available.

cs.LG↗

Improving Human Sequential Decision-Making with Reinforcement Learning

Workers spend a significant amount of time learning how to make good decisions. Evaluating the efficacy of a given decision, however, can be complicated -- e.g., decision outcomes are often long-term and relate to the original decision in complex ways. Surprisingly, even though learning good decision-making strategies is difficult, they can often be expressed in simple and concise forms. Focusing on sequential decision-making, we design a novel machine learning algorithm that is capable of extracting "best practices" from trace data and conveying its insights to humans in the form of interpretable "tips". Our algorithm selects the tip that best bridges the gap between the actions taken by human workers and those taken by the optimal policy in a way that accounts for which actions are consequential for achieving higher performance. We evaluate our approach through a series of randomized controlled experiments where participants manage a virtual kitchen. Our experiments show that the tips generated by our algorithm can significantly improve human performance relative to intuitive baselines. In addition, we discuss a number of empirical insights that can help inform the design of algorithms intended for human-AI interfaces. For instance, we find evidence that participants do not simply blindly follow our tips; instead, they combine them with their own experience to discover additional strategies for improving performance.

cs.LG↗

Community Vibrancy and its Relationship with Safety in Philadelphia

To what extent can the strength of a local urban community impact neighborhood safety? We construct measures of community vibrancy based on a unique dataset of block party permit approvals from the City of Philadelphia. Our first measure captures the overall volume of block party events in a neighborhood whereas our second measure captures differences in the type (regular versus spontaneous) of block party activities. We use both regression modeling and propensity score matching to control for the economic, demographic and land use characteristics of the surrounding neighborhood when examining the relationship between crime and our two measures of community vibrancy. We conduct our analysis on aggregate levels of crime and community vibrancy from 2006 to 2015 as well as the trends in community vibrancy and crime over this time period. We find that neighborhoods with a higher number of block parties have a significantly higher crime rate, while those holding a greater proportion of spontaneous block party events have a significantly lower crime rate. We also find that neighborhoods which have an increase in the proportion of spontaneous block parties over time are significantly more likely to have a decreasing trend in total crime incidence over that same time period.

stat.AP↗