Professor of Economics Max Kasy has been awarded a research grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support his research project ‘Social Foundations for Statistics and Machine Learning’.
Machine learning and economics is a growing area of research in the Department, and attracted a lot of interest during our Research Jamboree held in June 2022. This award is a significant development in plans to build this research agenda.
As Max explains, ‘while traditional statistics and machine learning are based on single-agent models in which an agent makes optimal decisions, in real life, there are multiple agents who make decisions based on different pieces of information to achieve different goals. Single-agent models pose many limitations and cannot answer questions, such as “Should statistical analyses be registered in pre-analysis plans?” or “How should we regulate social media companies, whose ad-click maximizing algorithms contribute to political polarization?”'
‘This project will develop foundations for statistics and machine learning which allow us to answer these and other questions, using models with multiple agents with conflicting objectives. I will show that questions such as those stated above can be resolved using a common set of theoretical tools, building on ideas from mechanism design’.
Max Kasy
To discover more about Max’s research and the Machine Learning and Economics Research Group, visit his profile.
