Publications

2023
אני-הוא: האמפתיה בהיסטוריה, בחברה ובתרבות
כנפו-נעם, אריאל et al., eds. אני-הוא: האמפתיה בהיסטוריה, בחברה ובתרבות. מאגנס, 2023. Web. Publisher's Version

יש הסבורים כי עולמנו חסר מידה רבה יותר של אמפתיה, הבנה והשתתפות ברגשות הזולת ורצון לדאוג לרווחתו, ויש הטוענים שהאמפתיה היא דווקא יועצת רעה בקבלת החלטות. יש מי ששמים, דגש על אמפתיה בפרשנות של אמנות או סִפרות, וחשים שהיא נחוצה בכל מחקר היסטורי, בעוד שאחרים מאמינים שהיא מטה את דעתו של ההיסטוריון. כך או כך, לאמפתיה תפקיד מרכזי בחוויה האנושית, במערכות יחסים ובתרבות.

האמפתיה היא השתתפות ברגשות הזולת ורצון לדאוג לרווחתו. האמפתיה מאפשרת לשאול שאלות חדשות בקשר ליחסים בין יחידים וקבוצות, בין תחומים שונים כמו אמנות והיסטוריה, בין ההיסטוריון למושא מחקרו ובין היצירה למי שנחשף אליה.

ספר זה הוא תוצאה של מפגש ייחודי ובלתי-אמצעי בין חוקרים וחוקרות במדעי הרוח והחברה, שנמשך שלוש שנים במרכז מנדל סכוליון הפועל במסגרת בית הספר ע"ש ג'ק, ג'וזף ומורטון מנדל ללימודים מתקדמים במדעי הרוח באוניברסיטה העברית. המאמרים הנכללים בו יוצאים מגישות-מחקר שונות והם עוסקים בהיבטים חברתיים שונים שהאמפתיה זוכה בהם לביטוי. כולם יחד מצביעים על רוחב היריעה של הפעילות האמפתית בספרות ובאמנות הוויזואלית, בתחומי ההיסטוריה והפסיכולוגיה ובהקשרים הבין-אישיים.

2022
Moshe, Ran Ben . Comparing Mechanisms For Selling Correlated Goods. 2022. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Consider the problem of maximizing the revenue from selling a number of heterogeneous goods to a single buyer whose private values for the goods are drawn from a (possibly correlated) known distribution, and whose valuation for the goods is additive. It is already known that when there are two (or more) goods, simple mechanisms may yield only a negligible fraction of the optimal revenue. This thesis compares revenues from various classes of mechanisms to revenues from the two simplest mechanisms — selling the goods separately and selling them as a bundle — by using previously defined tools, namely, multiple of separated revenue (MoS) and multiple of bundled revenue (MoB). We show in particular that monotonic mechanisms cannot yield more than times the separated revenue (where  is the number of goods), and obtain bounds on the revenue of deterministic mechanisms.

Moshe, Ran Ben, Sergiu Hart, and Noam Nisan. Monotonic Mechanisms For Selling Multiple Goods. Discussion Papers 2022. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Maximizing the revenue from selling two or more goods has been shown to require the use of nonmonotonic mechanisms, where a higher-valuation buyer may pay less than a lower-valuation one. Here we show that the restriction to monotonic mechanisms may not just lower the revenue, but may in fact yield only a negligible fraction of the maximal revenue; more precisely, the revenue from monotonic mechanisms is no more than k times the simple revenue obtainable by selling the goods separately, or bundled (where k is the number of goods), whereas the maximal revenue may be arbitrarily larger. We then study the class of monotonic mechanisms and its subclass of allocation-monotonic mechanisms, and obtain useful characterizations and revenue bounds.

שלטון האושר
אילוז, אווה, and אדגר קבאנאס. שלטון האושר. כתר, 2022. Print.

החתירה אל האושר והפגנת אופטימיות וחיוביות לנוכח כל מצב הפכו ממטרה שרבים שואפים אליה לציווי חברתי רב־עוצמה שקשה לחמוק ממנו. האושר מכתיב את התנהגותנו ואת הציפיות שיש לנו מעצמנו ומאחרים כמעט בכל תחומי החיים. אך האם הוא אכן הטוב העליון שאליו ראוי שכולנו נתאווה?נראה שככה לפחות חושבים כל מומחי האושר החדשים, יחד עם הפסיכולוגים החיוביים, כלכלני האושר וכוהני הצמיחה האישית למיניהם. מגובים בתמיכה מצד מוסדות בעלי השפעה ותאגידים בינלאומיים עתירי ממון, אותם מומחים מטעם עצמם מציעים לנו את עזרתם האדיבה אך הנחרצת כדי להורות לנו איזו מדיניות ממשלתית יש לאמץ, באילו התערבויות חינוכיות יש לנקוט ואילו שינויים נידרש לעשות על מנת שחיינו יהיו משמעותיים, בריאים וטובים יותר.במישור האישי משתמע מכך גם המסר, שאם כשלנו במשימה הרי זוהי אשמתנו שלא השכלנו לגייס מוטיבציה מספקת ודבקות במטרה.

שלטון האושר מתעד וממפה בעזרת ספקנות בריאה את ההשפעה העצומה שיש למדע ולתעשיות האושר על חיינו וטוען שהברית הניאו־ליברלית בין הפסיכולוגים, הכלכלנים וכוהני העזרה העצמית הִצמיחה צורה דכאנית חדשה המשמשת באופן גלוי וסמוי כלי בידי בעלי אינטרסים שונים להפעיל אמצעים של שליטה וכוח במטרה לקדם את טובתם ולהכשיר מקרים של אי־שוויון מבני.אווה אילוז היא סוציולוגית ישראלית פורה בעלת שם עולמי. בין ספריה שראו אור בעברית: ’מדוע האהבה כואבת’ ו’סופה של האהבה’, שזכו להצלחה גדולה.אדגר קַבאנאס הוא פרופסור לפסיכולוגיה בספרד ושותף לצוות המחקר במכוןPLANCK MAXשבברלין לחקר היסטורי של הרגשות. זהו ספרו הראשון.

2021
Bar-Hillel, Maya . Stumpers: An Annotated Compendium. 2021. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract

A stumper is a riddle whose solution is typically so elusive that it does not come to mind, at least initially – leaving the responder stumped. Stumpers work by eliciting a (typically visual) representation of the narrative, in which the solution is not to be found. In order to solve the stumper, the blocking representation must be changed, which does not happen to most respondents. I have collected all the riddles I know at this time that qualify, in my opinion, as stumpers. I have composed a few, and tested many. Whenever rates of correct solutions were available, they are included, giving a rough proxy for difficulty.

Dean P. Foster, Sergiu Hart . &Quot;Calibeating&Quot;: Beating Forecasters At Their Own Game. Discussion Papers 2021. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Forecasters should be tested by the Brier score and not just by the calibration score, which can always be made arbitrarily small. The Brier score is the sum of the calibration score and the refinement score; the latter measures how good the sorting into bins with the same forecast is, and thus attests to expertise.  This raises the question of whether one can gain calibration without losing expertise, which we refer to as calibeating.  We provide an easy way to calibeat any forecast, by a deterministic online procedure. We moreover show that calibeating can be achieved by a stochastic procedure that is itself calibrated, and then extend the results to simultaneously calibeating multiple procedures, and to deterministic procedures that are continuously calibrated.
Hart, Sergiu . Calibrated Forecasts: The Minimax Proof. Discussion Papers 2021. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
A formal write-up of the simple proof (1995) of the existence of calibrated forecasts by the minimax theorem, which moreover shows that N^3 periods suffice to guarantee a 1/N calibration error.
Elon Kohlberg, Abraham Neyman . Demystifying The Math Of The Coronavirus. Discussion Papers 2021. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
We provide an elementary mathematical description of the spread of the coronavirus. We explain two fundamental relationships: How the rate of growth in new infections is determined by the effective reproductive number ; and how the effective reproductive number is affected by social distancing. By making a key approximation, we are able to formulate these relationships very simply and thereby avoid complicated mathematics. The same approximation leads to an elementary method for estimating the effective reproductive number.
Kaplan, Todd R., and Shmuel Zamir. On The Strategic Use Of Seller Information In Private-Value First-Place Auctions. Discussion Papers 2021. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
In the framework of a private-value auction first-price, we consider the seller as a player in a game with the buyers in which he has private information about their realized values. We ask whether the seller can benefit by using his private information strategically. We find that in fact, depending upon his information, set of signals, and commitment power the seller may indeed increase his revenue by strategic transmission of his information. We study mainly the case of partial truthful commitment (VC) in which the seller can commit to send only truthful (verifiable) messages. We show that in the case of two buyers with values distributed independently uniformly on [0,1], a seller informed of the private values of the buyers, can achieve a revenue close to 1/2 by sending verifiable messages (compared to 1/3 in the standard auction), and this is the largest revenue that he can reach with any signaling strategy and any level of commitment. The case studied here provides valuable insight into the issue of strategic use of information which applies more generally.
Constantine Sorokin, Eyal Winter . Pure Information Design In Classic Auctions. Discussion Papers 2021. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
In many auction environments sellers are better informed about bidders' valuations than the bidders themselves. For such environments we derive a sharp and general optimal policy of information transmission in the case of independent private values. Under this policy bidders whose (ex-post) valuation is below a certain threshold are provided with all the information (about their valuations), but those bidders whose valuation lies below the threshold receive no information whatsoever. Surprisingly, the threshold expressed in percentiles is independent of the probability distribution over bidders' ex-post valuations; it depends solely on the number of bidders. Similar results are also derived for the bidder-optimal policy. Our analysis builds on the approach of Bayesian persuasion  and on a linearity of sellers' revenues as a function of the inverse distribution. This latter property allows us to use important results on stochastic comparisons.
Bar-Hillel, Maya . Stumpers: An Annotated Compendium. Discussion Papers 2021. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
A stumper is a riddle whose solution is typically so elusive that it does not come to mind, at least initially - leaving the responder stumped. Stumpers work by eliciting a (typically visual) representation of the narrative, in which the solution is not to be found. In order to solve the stumper, the blocking representation must be changed, which does not happen to most respondents. I have collected all the riddles I know at this time that qualify, in my opinion, as stumpers. I have composed a few, and tested many. Whenever rates of correct solutions were available, they are included, giving a rough proxy for difficulty
Aumann, Robert J. . Why Consciousness?. Discussion Papers 2021. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Emotions specially desire and the objects of desire, like enjoyment and satisfaction drive much of what we do; indeed they drive all we do that is not recurrent. They are thus indispensable to human life. Inter alia, emotions enable the operation of incentives like hunger for eating that motivate us to perform tasks that are vital to our lives. We suggest that the adaptive function of consciousness is to enable emotions to operate.
2020
Alexander Kravtsov, Eyal Winter . An Axiomatic Approach To Sensors Trust Measurements. Discussion Papers 2020. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
A set of sensors is used to identify which of the users, from a pre-specified set of users, is currently using a device. Each sensor provides a name of a user and a real number representing its level of confidence in the assessment. However, the sensors measure different signals for different traits that are largely unrelated. To be able to implement a policy based on these measurements, one needs to aggregate the information provided by all sensors. We use an axiomatic approach to provide several reasonable trust functions. We show that by providing a few desirable properties we can derive several solutions that are characterized by these properties. Our analysis makes use of an important result by Kolmogorov (1930).
Daniel Kahneman, Maya Bar-Hillel . Comment: Laplace And Cognitive Illusions. Discussion Papers 2020. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Reports in the 1970s of cognitive illusions in judgments of uncertainty had been anticipated by Laplace 150 years earlier. We discuss Miller and Gelman's remark that Laplace's anticipation of the main ideas of the heuristics and biases approach "gives us a new perspective on these ideas as more universal and less contingent on particular developments [that came much] later."
Alex Gershkov, Eyal Winter . Exploitative Priority Service. Discussion Papers 2020. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
We analyze the implications of introducing priority service on customers' welfare. In monopoly markets, introducing priority service decreases the customers' surplus despite increasing the assignment efficiency: the monopolist extracts from customers a total payment higher than the total efficiency gain generated by the service and hence leaves customers worse off compared with the situation where no priority is offered at all. In duopoly markets with homogeneous customers the equilibrium price and customers' welfare coincide with the monopoly outcome where this monopolist faces half of the market. With heterogeneous customers as well priority reduces the aggregated consumers' welfare. Our conclusion is that priority service erects barriers to competition that are embedded in the nature of the service provided, with the victims of these barriers primarily being agents with low willingness or low ability to pay for the priority.
Yigal Attali, Maya Bar-Hillel . False Allure Of Fast Lures, The. Discussion Papers 2020. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) allegedly measures the tendency to override the prepotent incorrect answers to some special problems, and to engage in further reflection. A growing literature suggests that the CRT is a powerful predictor of performance in a wide range of tasks. This research has mostly glossed over the fact that the CRT is composed of math problems. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether numerical CRT items do indeed call upon more than is required by standard math problems, and whether the latter predict performance in other tasks as well as the CRT. In Study 1 we selected from a bank of standard math problems items that, like CRT items, have a fast lure, as well as others which do not. A 1-factor model was the best supported measurement model for the underlying abilities required by all three item types. Moreover, the quality of all these items "CRT and math problems alike "as predictors of performance on a set of choice and reasoning tasks did not depend on whether or not they had a fast lure, but rather only on their quality as math items. In other words, CRT items seem not to be a special  category of math problems, although they are quite excellent ones. Study 2 replicated these results with a different population and a different set of math problems.
Zak, Uri . Female Chess Players Do Underperform When Playing Against Men: Commentary On Stafford (2018). Discussion Papers 2020. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Stafford (2018) found that female chess players outperform expectations when playing against men, in a study of data from over 5.5 million official games around the world. I examined whether that result could stem from not controlling for the ages of both players, as female players tend to be much younger than male players. Using the same data as Stafford, I was able to replicate his main result only when the opponent s age was ignored. When the ages of both players were included in the analysis, the gender-composition effect was reversed. Further analyses using other data demonstrated the robustness of this pattern, re-establishing that female chess players underperform when playing against men. Prior to Stafford s paper, the leading premise was that women encounter psychological obstacles that prevent them from performing at their normal capacity against men. My commentary continues that line of evidence and is consistent with the stereotype-threat explanation.
Sergiu Hart, Yosef Rinott . Posterior Probabilities: Nonmonotonicity, Log-Concavity, And Tur¡N's Inequality. Discussion Papers 2020. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
In the standard Bayesian framework the data are assumed to be generated by a distribution parametrized by ¸ in a parameter space , over which a prior distribution is defined. A Bayesian statistician quantifies the belief that the true parameter is ¸_0 in by its posterior probability given the observed data. We investigate the behavior of the posterior belief in ¸_0 when the data are generated under some parameter ¸_1, which may or may not be be the same as ¸_0. Starting from stochastic orders, specifically, likelihood ratio dominance, that obtain for resulting distributions of posteriors, we consider monotonicity properties of the posterior probabilities as a function of the sample size when data arrive sequentially. While the ¸_0-posterior is monotonically increasing (i.e., it is a submartingale) when the data are generated under that same ¸_0, it need not be monotonically decreasing in general, not even in terms of its overall expectation, when the data are generated under a different ¸_1; in fact, it may keep going up and down many times. In the framework of simple iid coin tosses, we show that under certain conditions the overall expected posterior of ¸_0 eventually becomes monotonically decreasing when the data are generated under ¸_1 ¸_0. Moreover, we prove that when the prior is uniform this expected posterior is a log-concave function of the sample size, by developing an inequality that is related to Tur¡n's inequality for Legendre polynomials.
2019
Maya Bar-Hillel, Cass R. Sunstein . Baffling Bathrooms: On Navigability And Choice Architecture. Discussion Papers 2019. Web. Publisher's Version
Bar-Hillel, Maya . The Base-Rate Fallacy In Probability Judgments. Discussion Papers 2019. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
The base-rate fallacy is people's tendency to ignore base rates in favor of, e.g., individuating information (when such is available), rather than integrate the two. This tendency has important implications for understanding judgment phenomena in many clinical, legal, and social-psychological settings. An explanation of this phenomenon is offered, according to which people order information by its perceived degree of relevance, and let high-relevance information dominate low-relevance information. Information is deemed more relevant when it relates more specifically to a judged target case. Specificity is achieved either by providing information on a smaller set than the overall population, of which the target case is a member, or when information can be coded, via causality, as information about the specific members of a given population. The base-rate fallacy is thus the result of pitting what seem to be merely coincidental, therefore low-relevance, base rates against more specific, or causal, information. A series of probabilistic inference problems is presented in which relevance was manipulated with the means described above, and the empirical results confirm the above account. In particular, base rates will be combined with other information when the two kinds of information are perceived as being equally relevant to the judged case.