Related papers: Should the democrats move to the left on economic …
The classic Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem says that every strategy-proof voting rule with at least three possible candidates must be dictatorial. Similar impossibility results hold even if we consider a weaker notion of strategy-proofness…
This paper proposes a framework for categorizing economic policies in a form of a tree taxonomy. The purpose of this approach is to construct an exhaustive and standardized list of actions that a governing authority has access to and can…
Opinion dynamics models how the publicly expressed opinions of users in a social network coevolve according to their neighbors as well as their own intrinsic opinion. Motivated by the real-world manipulation of social networks during the…
Spatial voting models of legislators' preferences are used in political science to test theories about their voting behavior. These models posit that legislators' ideologies as well as the ideologies reflected in votes for and against a…
In this paper, we show that when policy-motivated parties can commit to a particular platform during a uni-dimensional electoral contest where valence issues do not arise there must be a positive association between the policies preferred…
It is well known that no reasonable voting rule is strategyproof. Moreover, the common Plurality rule is particularly prone to strategic behavior of the voters and empirical studies show that people often vote strategically in practice.…
We compare federal election results for each state versus the USA in every second year from 1992 to 2018, to model partisan lean of each state and its dependence on the nationwide popular vote. For each state, we model both its current…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
Political actors often manipulate redistricting plans to gain electoral advantages, a process known as gerrymandering. Several states have implemented institutional reforms to address this problem, such as establishing map-drawing…
Uncertainty persists over how and why some countries become democratic and others do not, or why some countries remain democratic and others 'backslide' toward autocracy. Furthermore, while scholars generally agree on the nature of…
To study the assumption that the utility maximization hypothesis implicitly adds to consumer theory, we consider a mathematical representation of pre-marginal revolution consumer theory based on subjective exchange ratios. We introduce two…
We consider a system in which a group of agents represented by the vertices of a graph synchronously update their opinion based on that of their neighbours. If each agent adopts a positive opinion if and only if that opinion is sufficiently…
We propose a new version of the spatial model of voting. Platforms of five parties are evolving in a two-dimensional landscape of political issues so as to get maximal numbers of voters. For a Gaussian landscape the evolution leads to a…
Side preference is a critical behavior in conflict handling, and here the behavior is investigated with pedestrian trajectories in circle antipode experiments that own both conflicting and symmetrical participant situations. In the series…
Voter demographics and socio-economic factors like age, sex, ethnicity, education level, income, and other measurable factors like behaviour in previous elections or referenda are of key importance in modelling opinion formation dynamics.…
We consider the task of evaluating a policy for a Markov decision process (MDP). The standard unbiased technique for evaluating a policy is to deploy the policy and observe its performance. We show that the data collected from deploying a…
This paper develops a new model of business cycles. The model is economical in that it is solved with an aggregate demand-aggregate supply diagram, and the effects of shocks and policies are obtained by comparative statics. The model builds…
Economists often define the middle class based on income distribution, yet selecting which segment constitutes the `middle' is essentially arbitrary. This paper proposes a definition of the middle class based solely on the properties of…
Winner selection by majority, in an election between two candidates, is the only rule compatible with democratic principles. Instead, when the candidates are three or more and the voters rank candidates in order of preference, there are no…
It is well known, by the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem, that when there are more than two candidates, any non-dictatorial voting rule can be manipulated by untruthful voters. But how strong is the incentive to manipulate under different…