Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Calendar of Events

S Sun

M Mon

T Tue

W Wed

T Thu

F Fri

S Sat

0 events,

0 events,

0 events,

0 events,

0 events,

0 events,

0 events,

0 events,

1 event,

Other Events Andreas Haupt

0 events,

0 events,

0 events,

1 event,

Stochastics and Statistics Seminar Series Lihua Lei

0 events,

0 events,

2 events,

Other Events Leon Yao

IDSS Distinguished Seminar Series Andrey Fradkin

0 events,

0 events,

1 event,

0 events,

0 events,

0 events,

0 events,

0 events,

0 events,

0 events,

1 event,

0 events,

0 events,

0 events,

0 events,

0 events,

0 events,

1 event,

Stochastics and Statistics Seminar Series Giles Hooker

0 events,

SES Dissertation Defense

Andreas Haupt (IDSS)
32-D463

The Economic Engineering of Personalized Experiences ABSTRACT Consumer applications employ algorithms to deliver personalized experiences to users, among others, in search, e-commerce, online streaming, and social media, impacting how users spend their time and money. The dissertation studies the design of such personalization algorithms and the social consequences of their deployment. The first chapter analyzes how preference measurement error differentially affects user groups in optimal personalization. Under such measurement error, welfare maximization is incompatible with equalizing the utility of (statistical)…

Find out more »

Model-agnostic covariate-assisted inference on partially identified causal effects

Lihua Lei (Stanford University)
E18-304

Abstract: Many causal estimands are only partially identifiable since they depend on the unobservable joint distribution between potential outcomes. Stratification on pretreatment covariates can yield sharper partial identification bounds; however, unless the covariates are discrete with relatively small support, this approach typically requires consistent estimation of the conditional distributions of the potential outcomes given the covariates. Thus, existing approaches may fail under model misspecification or if consistency assumptions are violated. In this study, we propose a unified and model-agnostic inferential…

Find out more »

SES Dissertation Defense

Leon Yao (IDSS)
E18-304

Causal Inference Under Privacy Constraints ABSTRACT Causal inference is an important tool for learning the effects of interventions in observational or experimental settings. It is widely used in many fields such as epidemiology, economics, and political science to find answers like the average treatment effect of a medical procedure or the individual treatment effect of a personalized ad campaign. In commercial applications, the era of big data allows companies to increase their experiment volume, incentivizing them, in turn, to collect…

Find out more »

Data Sharing and Website Competition: The Role of Dark Patterns

Andrey Fradkin (Boston University)
MIT Building E18, Room 304

Abstract:  Regulations like the GDPR require firms to obtain consumer consent before using data. In response, some firms employ ``dark patterns'' --- interface designs that nudge consumers to share data. We study the causal effects of these designs and how they vary across individuals and firms. To do so, we run a field experiment in which users download a browser extension that randomizes cookie consent interface designs as users browse the Internet. We find that consumers accept all cookies more…

Find out more »

IDSS Community Social

Host: Prof. Fotini Christia (IDSS)
E17-399

All IDSS and extended IDSS community members welcome, including students, postdocs, faculty, and staff. Snacks provided!

Find out more »

Trees and V’s: Inference for Ensemble Models

Giles Hooker (Wharton School - UPenn)
E18-304

Abstract: This talk discusses uncertainty quantification and inference using ensemble methods. Recent theoretical developments inspired by random forests have cast bagging-type methods as U-statistics when bootstrap samples are replaced by subsamples, resulting in a central limit theorem and hence the potential for inference. However, to carry this out requires estimating a variance for which all proposed estimators exhibit substantial upward bias. In this talk, we convert subsamples without replacement to subsamples with replacement resulting in V-statistics for which we prove…

Find out more »


MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
617-253-1764