9 papers
Scarcity and Predictive Uncertainty: Implications for Societal Resource Allocation
Shafkat Farabi, Patrick J. Fowler, Sanmay Das
An emerging literature examines the critical question of when and how prediction can be useful in allocating scarce societal resources. We examine a novel variant of this question:…
Can LLMs Rank? A Tale of Triads and Triage
Gaurab Pokharel, Shafkat Farabi, Patrick J. Fowler +1
From housing allocation for households experiencing homelessness to triage in emergency departments, LLMs are increasingly being considered as judges of consequential decisions tha…
Benchmarking Geospatial Foundation Models for Agriculture Applications
Zhuocheng Shang, Sanmay Das, Ahmed Eldawy
Geospatial foundation models pretrained on satellite imagery promise broad generalization across remote sensing tasks and regions, but their geographic transferability has not been…
SMaRT: Online Reusable Resource Assignment and an Application to Mediation in the Kenyan Judiciary
Shafkat Farabi, Didac Marti Pinto, Wei Lu +4
Motivated by the problem of assigning mediators to cases in the Kenyan judicial system, we study an online resource allocation problem where incoming tasks (cases) must be immediat…
Fixed Points and Stochastic Meritocracies: A Long-Term Perspective
Gaurab Pokharel, Diptangshu Sen, Sanmay Das +1
We study group fairness in the context of feedback loops induced by meritocratic selection into programs that themselves confer additional advantage, like college admissions. We in…
Budgeting Discretion: Theory and Evidence on Street-Level Decision-Making
Gaurab Pokharel, Sanmay Das, Patrick J. Fowler
Street-level bureaucrats, such as caseworkers and border guards routinely face the dilemma of whether to follow rigid policy or exercise discretion based on professional judgement.…