Related papers: Boundary effects in a three-state modified voter m…
We extend simple opinion models to obtain stable but continuously evolving communities. Our scope is to meet a challenge raised by sociologists of generating "structures that last from non lasting entities". We achieve this by introducing…
Political polarization is perceived as a threat to democracies. Using the Galam model of opinion dynamics deployed in a five-dimensional parameter space, I show that polarization is the byproduct of an essential hallmark of a vibrant…
We analyze the winning coalitions that arise under Bloc voting when voters preferences are single-peaked. For small numbers of candidates and numbers of winners, we determine conditions under which candidates in winning coalitions are…
We study metric distortion in distributed voting, where $n$ voters are partitioned into $k$ groups, each selecting a local representative, and a final winner is chosen from these representatives (or from the entire set of candidates). This…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are a transformational technology, fundamentally changing how people obtain information and interact with the world. As people become increasingly reliant on them for an enormous variety of tasks, a body of…
Voting is a simple mechanism to aggregate the preferences of agents. Many voting rules have been shown to be NP-hard to manipulate. However, a number of recent theoretical results suggest that this complexity may only be in the worst-case…
We study low sample complexity mechanisms in participatory budgeting (PB), where each voter votes for a preferred allocation of funds to various projects, subject to project costs and total spending constraints. We analyze the distortion…
We study the dynamics of a version of the batch minority game, with random external information and with different types of inhomogeneous decision noise (additive and multiplicative), using generating functional techniques \`{a} la De…
We investigate the dynamics of the voter model in which the population itself changes endogenously via the birth-death process. There are two species of voters, labeled A and B, and the population of each species can grow or shrink by the…
Stochastic resonance is a non-linear phenomenon, in which the sensitivity of signal detectors can be enhanced by adding random noise to the detector input. Here, we demonstrate that noise can also improve the information flux in recurrent…
We study the effect of inflexible agents on two state opinion dynamics. The model operates via repeated local updates of random grouping of agents. While floater agents do eventually flip their opinion to follow the local majority,…
We consider a two-round election model involving $m$ voters and $n$ candidates. Each voter is endowed with a strict preference list ranking the candidates. In the first round, the candidates are partitioned into two subsets, $A$ and $B$,…
We introduce a simple model of opinion dynamics in which binary-state agents evolve due to the influence of agents in a local neighborhood. In a single update step, a fixed-size group is defined and all agents in the group adopt the state…
We study the robustness of classifiers to various kinds of random noise models. In particular, we consider noise drawn uniformly from the $\ell\_p$ ball for $p \in [1, \infty]$ and Gaussian noise with an arbitrary covariance matrix. We…
Representative democracy in the United States relies on election systems that transmit votes into representatives in three key bodies: the two chambers of the federal legislature (House of Representatives and Senate) and the Electoral…
As large language models (LLMs) move from static reasoning tasks toward dynamic environments, their success depends on the ability to navigate and respond to an environment that changes as they interact at inference time. An underexplored…
There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…
By classic results in social choice theory, any reasonable preferential voting method sometimes gives individuals an incentive to report an insincere preference. The extent to which different voting methods are more or less resistant to…
The task of state discrimination for a set of mutually orthogonal pure states is trivial if one has access to the corresponding sharp (projection-valued) measurement, but what if we are restricted to an unsharp measurement? Given that any…
The equilibrium states associated with the local majority-rule are divided into three classes, the states of system-wide coordination, the trapped states, and the states of period-2. The effect of clustering coefficient on the occurrence…