Welcome!

Dr. Joshua Kavner is a Senior Data Scientist at C3 AI, where he develops AI and machine learning solutions for large-scale enterprise systems. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and his B.S. in Data Science Engineering from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining C3 AI, he held research and engineering roles at the RAND Corporation, Meta, and IBM. His research explores how autonomous agents can cooperate despite competing incentives, combining ideas from computational social choice, multi-agent reinforcement learning, and algorithmic game theory.




Ongoing work:

Fair Like Us? Auditing LLM Alignment in Resource Allocation
Samarth Khanna, Sujoy Sikdar, Joshua Kavner, Hadi Hosseini, Qishen Han, and Lirong Xia.
In Submission.

Human Perceptions of Fairness Guarantees in Resource Allocation
Hadi Hosseini, Joshua Kavner, Samarth Khanna, Sujoy Sikdar, and Lirong Xia.
In Submission.

Average-Case Analysis of Iterative Voting
Joshua Kavner and Lirong Xia
In Submission.

Publications:
Stabilizing Welfare-Maximizing Decisions via Endogenous Transfers
Joshua Kavner
In Proceedings of IJCAI'26

Judge Reliability Harness: Stress Testing the Reliability of LLM Judges
Sunischal Dev, Andrew Sloan, Joshua Kavner, Nicholas Kong, and Morgan Sandler.
In the Workshop on Agents in the Wild at ICLR 2026.
[Github link] [Documentation]

Strategic Dynamics in the Race to AGI: a Time to Race versus a Time to Restrain.
Lisa Abraham, Joshua Kavner, Alvin Moon, and Jason Matheny
In The Digitalist Papers, Vol. 2.

Epistemic vs. Counterfactual Fairness in Allocation of Resources
Hadi Hosseini, Joshua Kavner, Sujoy Sikdar, Rohit Vaish, and Lirong Xia
In Proceedings of EAAMO'25.

Distribution of Chores with Information Asymmetry
Hadi Hosseini, Joshua Kavner, Tomasz Wąs, and Lirong Xia
In Proceedings of ECAI'24.

Convergence of Multi-Issue Iterative Voting under Uncertainty
Joshua Kavner, Reshef Meir, Francesca Rossi, and Lirong Xia
In Proceedings of IJCAI'23.

Strategic Behavior is Bliss: Iterative Voting Improves Social Welfare
Joshua Kavner and Lirong Xia
In Proceedings of NeurIPS'21.

Philosophy of Science, Network Theory, and Conceptual Change:
Paradigm Shifts as Information Cascades
Patrick Grim, Joshua Kavner, Lloyd Shatkin, and Manjari Trivedi
In Complex Systems in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: Theory, Method, and Application
by Euell Elliot and J Douglas Kiel, University of Michigan Press. June, 2021.

In my free time, I dance Lindy Hop, play the piano, read, and photograph. Check out my photos below!