Assessing Human Error Against a Benchmark of Perfection

An increasing number of domains are providing us with detailed trace data on human decisions in settings where we can evaluate the quality of these decisions via an algorithm. Motivated by this development, an emerging line of work has begun to consider whether we can characterize and predict the kinds of decisions where people are likely to make errors. To investigate what a general framework for human error prediction might look like, we focus on a model system with a rich history in the behavioral sciences: the decisions made by chess players as they select moves in a game. We carry out our analysis at a large scale, employing datasets with several million recorded games, and using chess tablebases to acquire a form of ground truth for a subset of chess positions that have been completely solved by computers but remain challenging even for the best players in the world. We organize our analysis around three categories of features that we argue are present in most settings where the analysis of human error is applicable: the skill of the decision-maker, the time available to make the decision, and the inherent difficulty of the decision. We identify rich structure in all three of these categories of features, and find strong evidence that in our domain, features describing the inherent difficulty of an instance are significantly more powerful than features based on skill or time.Comment: KDD 2016; 10 page

Infrastructure and public utilities privatization in developing countries

The paper analyzes governments'tradeoff between fiscal benefits and consumer surplus in privatization reforms of noncompetitive industries in developing countries. Under privatization, the control rights are transferred to private interests so that public subsidies decline. This benefit for tax-payers comes at the cost of price increases for consumers. In developing countries, tight budget constraints imply that privatization may be optimal for low profitability segments. For highly profitable public utilities, the combination of allocative inefficiency and critical budgetary conditions may favor public ownership. Finally, once a market segment gives room for more than one firm, governments prefer to regulate the industry. In the absence of a credible regulatory agency, regulation is achieved through public ownership.Economic Theory&Research,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Privatization,Markets and Market Access,State Owned Enterprise Reform

Combinatorial Voting

We study elections that simultaneously decide multiple issues, where voters have independent private values over bundles of issues. The innovation is in considering nonseparable preferences, where issues may be complements or substitutes. Voters face a political exposure problem: the optimal vote for a particular issue will depend on the resolution of the other issues. Moreover, the probabilities that the other issues will pass should be conditioned on being pivotal. We prove that equilibrium exists when distributions over values have full support or when issues are complements. We then study large elections with two issues. There exists a nonempty open set of distributions where the probability of either issue passing fails to converge to either 1 or 0 for all limit equilibria. Thus, the outcomes of large elections are not generically predictable with independent private values, despite the fact that there is no aggregate uncertainty regarding fundamentals. While the Condorcet winner is not necessarily the outcome of a multi-issue election, we provide sufficient conditions that guarantee the implementation of the Condorcet winner. © 2012 The Econometric Society

The Compromise Game: Two-Sided Adverse Selection in the Laboratory

We analyze a game of two-sided private information where players have privately known “strengths” and can decide to fight or compromise. If either chooses to fight, the stronger player receives a high payoff and the weaker player receives a low payoff. If both choose to compromise, each player receives an intermediate payoff. The only equilibrium is for players to always fight. In our experiment, we observe frequent compromise, more fighting the lower the compromise payoff and less fighting by first than second movers. We explore several theories of cognitive limitations in an attempt to understand these anomalous findings

BayesChess: A computer chess program based on Bayesian networks

In this paper we introduce a chess program able to adapt its game strategy to its opponent, as well as to adapt the evaluation function that guides the search process according to its playing experience. The adaptive and learning abilities have been implemented through Bayesian networks. We show how the program learns through an experiment consisting on a series of games that point out that the results improve after the learning stage

Voting Power : A Generalised Framework

This paper examines an area of Game Theory called Voting Power Theory. With the adoption of a measure theoretic framework it argues that the many different indices and tools currently used for measuring voting power can be replaced by just three simple probabilities. The framework is sufficiently general to be applicable to every conceivable type of voting game, and every possible decision rule