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AI systems are breaking an internet that was designed at human-scale — by making it cheaper than ever to coordinate, transact, and generate voice, video, and text that are increasingly indistinguishable from human activity. We’re already beset w
Yannai A. Gonczarowski (Harvard University) axiomatically defines a cardinal social inefficiency function, which, given a set of alternatives and individuals’ vNM preferences over the alternatives, assigns a unique number — the social inefficiency — to each alternative. These numbers — and not only their order — are uniquely defined by our axioms despite no exogenously given interpersonal comparison, outside option, or disagreement point. We interpret these numbers as per capita losses in endogenously normalized utility. We apply our social inefficiency function to a setting in which interpersonal comparison is notoriously hard to justify — object allocation without money — leveraging techniques from computer science to prove an approximate-efficiency result for the Random Serial Dictatorship mechanism. Joint work with Ella Segev.
About the presenter
Yannai is an Assistant Professor of Economics and of Computer Science at Harvard University. Interested in both economic theory and theoretical computer science, Yannai explores computer-science-inspired economics, harnessing approaches, aesthetics, and techniques traditionally originating in computer science to derive economically meaningful insights. Yannai received his PhD from the Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science, and the Center for the Study of Rationality, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His first textbook, “Mathematical Logic through Python,” which introduces a new approach to teaching the material of a basic Logic course to Computer Science students, tailored to the unique intuitions and strengths of this cohort of students, was published by Cambridge University Press.
About a16z crypto research
a16z crypto research is a multidisciplinary lab that works closely with our portfolio companies and others toward solving the important problems in the space, and toward advancing the science and technology of the next generation of the internet.
More about us: a16z.com/2022/04/21/announcing-a16z-crypto-research
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