arXiv subjects

Yaron Azrieli

Publications and source records attributed to Yaron Azrieli.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Elicitability

An analyst is tasked with producing a statistical study. The analyst is not monitored and is able to manipulate the study. He can receive payments contingent on his report and trusted data collected from an independent source, modeled as a statistical experiment. We describe the information that can be elicited with appropriately shaped incentives, and apply our framework to a variety of common statistical models. We then compare experiments based on the information they enable us to elicit. This order is connected to, but different from, the Blackwell order. Data preferred for estimation are also preferred for elicitation, but not conversely. Our results shed light on how using data as incentive generator in payment schemes differs from using data for statistical inference.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2025

Sequential Non-Bayesian Persuasion

We study a model of persuasion in which the receiver's updating rule systematically distorts Bayesian posteriors. While in the classic Bayesian case providing information sequentially is never valuable, we show that the sender gains from sequential persuasion in several of the environments considered in the literature on strategic information transmission. Our proofs are constructive and reveal how properties of the bias interact with the payoff environment to make dynamic persuasion beneficial.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2025

Anonymous voting in a heterogeneous society

We study the design of voting mechanisms in a binary social choice environment where agents' cardinal valuations are independent but not necessarily identically distributed. The mechanism must be anonymous -- the outcome is invariant to permutations of the reported values. We show that if there are two agents then expected welfare is always maximized by an ordinal majority rule, but with three or more agents there are environments in which cardinal mechanisms that take into account preference intensities outperform any ordinal mechanism.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2024

Success functions in large contests

We consider contests with a large set (continuum) of participants and axiomatize contest success functions that arise when performance is composed of both effort and a random element, and when winners are those whose performance exceeds a cutoff determined by a market clearing condition. A co-monotonicity property is essentially all that is needed for a representation in the general case, but significantly stronger conditions must hold to obtain an additive structure. We illustrate the usefulness of this framework by revisiting some of the classic questions in the contests literature.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2024

Temporary exclusion in repeated contests

Consider a population of agents who repeatedly compete for awards, as in the case of researchers annually applying for grants. Noise in the selection process may encourage entry of low quality proposals, forcing the principal to commit large resources to reviewing applications and further increasing award misallocation. A \emph{temporary exclusion} policy prohibits an agent from applying in the current period if they were rejected in the previous. We compare the steady state equilibria of the games with and without exclusion. Whenever the benefit from winning is sufficiently large exclusion results in more self-selection, eliminating entry of low quality applications. We extend the analysis to more general exclusion policies. We also show that exclusion has a distributional effect, where better able agents exhibit more self-selection.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2022

Marginal stochastic choice

Models of stochastic choice typically use conditional choice probabilities given menus as the primitive for analysis, but in the field these are often hard to observe. Moreover, studying preferences over menus is not possible with this data. We assume that an analyst can observe marginal frequencies of choice and availability, but not conditional choice frequencies, and study the testable implications of some prominent models of stochastic choice for this dataset. We also analyze whether parameters of these models can be identified. Finally, we characterize the marginal distributions that can arise under two-stage models in the spirit of Gul and Pesendorfer [2001] and of kreps [1979] where agents select the menu before choosing an alternative.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2014

Rental harmony with roommates

We prove existence of envy-free allocations in markets with heterogenous indivisible goods and money, when a given quantity is supplied from each of the goods and agents have unit demands. We depart from most of the previous literature by allowing agents' preferences over the goods to depend on the entire vector of prices. Our proof uses Shapley's K-K-M-S theorem and Hall's marriage lemma. We then show how our theorem may be applied in two related problems: Existence of envy-free allocations in a version of the cake-cutting problem, and existence of equilibrium in an exchange economy with indivisible goods and money.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2011

Lipschitz Games

The Lipschitz constant of a finite normal-form game is the maximal change in some player's payoff when a single opponent changes his strategy. We prove that games with small Lipschitz constant admit pure {\epsilon}-equilibria, and pinpoint the maximal Lipschitz constant that is sufficient to imply existence of pure {\epsilon}-equilibrium as a function of the number of players in the game and the number of strategies of each player. Our proofs use the probabilistic method.

math.CO↗