Related papers: Should the democrats move to the left on economic …
I develop a rather simple agent-based model to capture a co-evolution of opinion formation, political decision making and economic outcomes. I use this model to study how societies form opinions if their members have opposing interests.…
This paper presents mathematics relevant to the question whether voting should be mandatory. Assuming a static distribution of voters' political beliefs, we model how politicians might adjust their positions to raise their share of the…
In light of the classic impossibility results of Arrow and Gibbard and Satterthwaite regarding voting with ordinal rules, there has been recent interest in characterizing how well common voting rules approximate the social optimum. In order…
Humans have come to rely on machines for reducing excessive information to manageable representations. But this reliance can be abused -- strategic machines might craft representations that manipulate their users. How can a user make good…
An increasing number of politicians are relying on cheaper, easier to access technologies such as online social media platforms to communicate with their constituency. These platforms present a cheap and low-barrier channel of communication…
Fine-tuned LLMs often exhibit unexpected behavior as a result of generalizing beyond the data they're shown. We present results in which an LLM fine-tuned to prefer either coastal sports teams or Southern sports teams adopt political…
We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…
We study group decision making with changing preferences as a Markov Decision Process. We are motivated by the increasing prevalence of automated decision-making systems when making choices for groups of people over time. Our main…
How well do demographics explain party identification? Demographics are related to party identification in political polls, news articles, and academic publications. Yet, there is a diversity of party identification even within demographic…
Direct democracy is a special case of an ensemble of classifiers, where every person (classifier) votes on every issue. This fails when the average voter competence (classifier accuracy) falls below 50%, which can happen in noisy settings…
While deep neural networks (DNNs) have been increasingly applied to choice analysis showing high predictive power, it is unclear to what extent researchers can interpret economic information from DNNs. This paper demonstrates that DNNs can…
We consider a social choice problem where only a small number of people out of a large population are sufficiently available or motivated to vote. A common solution to increase participation is to allow voters use a proxy, that is, transfer…
Campaign analysis is an integral part of American democracy and has many complexities in its dynamics. Experts have long sought to understand these dynamics and evaluate campaign performance using a variety of techniques. We explore…
Policy Iteration (PI) is a widely used family of algorithms to compute optimal policies for Markov Decision Problems (MDPs). We derive upper bounds on the running time of PI on Deterministic MDPs (DMDPs): the class of MDPs in which every…
How does targeted advertising influence electoral outcomes? This paper presents a one-dimensional spatial model of voting in which a privately informed challenger persuades voters to support him over the status quo. I show that targeted…
We study the ordering dynamics of nonlinear voter models with multiple states, also providing a discussion of the two-state model. The rate with which an individual adopts an opinion scales as the $q$-th power of the number of the…
Opinion polls have been the bridge between public opinion and politicians in elections. However, developing surveys to disclose people's feedback with respect to economic issues is limited, expensive, and time-consuming. In recent years,…
In an election, we are given a set of voters, each having a preference list over a set of candidates, that are distributed on a social network. We consider a scenario where voters may change their preference lists as a consequence of the…
Elections and opinion polls often have many candidates, with the aim to either rank the candidates or identify a small set of winners according to voters' preferences. In practice, voters do not provide a full ranking; instead, each voter…
We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are…