Related papers: Should the democrats move to the left on economic …
Welfare economics relies on access to agents' utility functions: we revisit classical questions in welfare economics, assuming access to data on agents' past choices instead of their utilities. Our main result considers the existence of…
Street-level bureaucrats, such as caseworkers and border guards routinely face the dilemma of whether to follow rigid policy or exercise discretion based on professional judgement. However, frequent overrides threaten consistency and…
The unchecked spread of digital information, combined with increasing political polarization and the tendency of individuals to isolate themselves from opposing political viewpoints, has driven researchers to develop systems for…
Increased sharing of untrustworthy information on social media platforms is one of the main challenges of our modern information society. Because information disseminated by political elites is known to shape citizen and media discourse, it…
We study how electoral rules shape polarization dynamics when voters and candidates both adapt to repeated election outcomes. We introduce two geometric primitives for comparing rules under this feedback: the \emph{winner radius} $R_t =…
We examine a green transition policy involving a tax on brown goods in an economy where preferences for green consumption consist of a constant intrinsic individual component and an evolving social component. We analyse equilibrium dynamics…
Some researchers speculate that intelligent reinforcement learning (RL) agents would be incentivized to seek resources and power in pursuit of their objectives. Other researchers point out that RL agents need not have human-like…
This study investigates adversarial attacks conducted to distort voter model dynamics in complex networks. Specifically, a simple adversarial attack method is proposed to hold the state of opinions of an individual closer to the target…
The study of US-China relations has always been a crucial topic in our economic development [4][5][7], and the US presidential election plays an integral role in shaping these relations. The presidential election is held every four years,…
We investigate the geometry of optimal memoryless time independent decision making in relation to the amount of information that the acting agent has about the state of the system. We show that the expected long term reward, discounted or…
The relationship of policy choice by majority voting and by maximization of utilitarian welfare has long been discussed. I consider choice between a status quo and a proposed policy when persons have interpersonally comparable cardinal…
Empirical research shows that individuals' responses to treatments vary along latent characteristics, such as innate ability or motivation. Therefore, a policymaker seeking to maximize welfare may consider designing policies based on…
May's Theorem (1952), a celebrated result in social choice, provides the foundation for majority rule. May's crucial assumption of symmetry, often thought of as a procedural equity requirement, is violated by many choice procedures that…
In multiwinner approval voting, the goal is to select $k$-member committees based on voters' approval ballots. A well-studied concept of proportionality in this context is the justified representation (JR) axiom, which demands that no large…
A policymaker discloses public information to interacting agents who also acquire costly private information. More precise public information reduces the precision and cost of acquired private information. Considering this effect, what…
We introduce the concept of an {\em operator decision making technique} and apply it to a concrete political problem: should a given political party form a coalition or not? We focus on the situation of three political parties, and divide…
The voter model on networks is crucial to understand opinion formation. Uni-directional social interactions are ubiquitous in real social networks whereas undirected interactions are intensively studied. We establish a voter model on a…
In the theory of dynamic programming, an optimal policy is a policy whose lifetime value dominates that of all other policies from every possible initial condition in the state space. This raises a natural question: when does optimality…
This paper presents a novel mechanism to endogenously determine the fair division of a state into electoral districts in a two-party setting. No geometric constraints are imposed on voter distributions or district shapes; instead, it is…
The related concepts of partisan belief systems, issue alignment, and partisan sorting are central to our understanding of politics. These phenomena have been studied using measures of alignment between pairs of topics, or how much…