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Incentivizing Desirable Effort Profiles in Strategic Classification: The Role of Causality and Uncertainty

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arxiv 2502.06749 v1 pith:JYSDPRD3 submitted 2025-02-10 cs.GT cs.CYcs.LG

Incentivizing Desirable Effort Profiles in Strategic Classification: The Role of Causality and Uncertainty

classification cs.GT cs.CYcs.LG
keywords featuresagentscausaluncertaintyclassifierdesirableeffortagent
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We study strategic classification in binary decision-making settings where agents can modify their features in order to improve their classification outcomes. Importantly, our work considers the causal structure across different features, acknowledging that effort in a given feature may affect other features. The main goal of our work is to understand \emph{when and how much agent effort is invested towards desirable features}, and how this is influenced by the deployed classifier, the causal structure of the agent's features, their ability to modify them, and the information available to the agent about the classifier and the feature causal graph. In the complete information case, when agents know the classifier and the causal structure of the problem, we derive conditions ensuring that rational agents focus on features favored by the principal. We show that designing classifiers to induce desirable behavior is generally non-convex, though tractable in special cases. We also extend our analysis to settings where agents have incomplete information about the classifier or the causal graph. While optimal effort selection is again a non-convex problem under general uncertainty, we highlight special cases of partial uncertainty where this selection problem becomes tractable. Our results indicate that uncertainty drives agents to favor features with higher expected importance and lower variance, potentially misaligning with principal preferences. Finally, numerical experiments based on a cardiovascular disease risk study illustrate how to incentivize desirable modifications under uncertainty.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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    Formalizes improvement-aware strategic classification for linear classifiers under single-index models, proves the strategic-optimal classifier is a parallel shift of the Bayes boundary, and supplies PAC guarantees wi...

  2. Beyond Independent Manipulation: Individual Fairness-aware Strategic Classification with Peer Imitation

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Introduces IFSC framework modeling peer imitation in individual fairness-aware strategic classification to improve fairness consistency under interdependent manipulations.

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    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

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  4. Linear Strategic Classification with Endogenous Improvements

    cs.LG 2026-05 reject novelty 5.0

    In a linear strategic-classification model where manipulation can genuinely improve outcomes, the optimal strategic classifier is a parallel shift of the Bayes boundary, and it is a provably better proxy for the impro...

  5. When Tabular Foundation Models Meet Strategic Tabular Data: A Prior Alignment Approach

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    The paper proposes Strategic Prior-data Fitted Network (SPN), an inference-time method that adapts pretrained tabular foundation models to strategic feature manipulation by constructing aligned in-context examples.

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    Constraining a strategic classifier to keep desirable-effort incentives fair between two groups costs the principal an explicit accuracy or welfare loss bounded by the fairness tolerance beta.

  7. Partial Fairness Awareness: Belief-Guided Strategic Mechanism for Strategic Agents

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    Introduces partial fairness awareness (PFA) and a belief-guided mechanism allowing strategic agents to align beliefs with a hidden grounding fairness constraint via iterative interaction.