Related papers: Modularity and Optimality in Social Choice

Recent progress in the large scale mapping of social networks is opening new quantitative windows into the structure of human societies. These networks are largely the result of how we access and utilize information. Here I show that a…

Local decision rules are commonly understood to be more explainable, due to the local nature of the patterns involved. With numerical optimization methods such as gradient boosting, ensembles of local decision rules can gain good predictive…

Two natural and widely used representations for the community structure of networks are clusterings, which partition the vertex set into disjoint subsets, and layouts, which assign the vertices to positions in a metric space. This paper…

Information sharing between individuals is crucial to improve performance in collective tasks. However, in a competitive world, individuals may be reluctant to share information with the others, and it is still unclear how the presence of…

Social choice theory is the study of preference aggregation across a population, used both in mechanism design for human agents and in the democratic alignment of language models. In this study, we propose the representative social choice…

Random utility theory models an agent's preferences on alternatives by drawing a real-valued score on each alternative (typically independently) from a parameterized distribution, and then ranking the alternatives according to scores. A…

We study competition among contests in a general model that allows for an arbitrary and heterogeneous space of contest design, where the goal of the contest designers is to maximize the contestants' sum of efforts. Our main result shows…

An urban planner might design the spatial layout of transportation amenities so as to improve accessibility for underserved communities -- a fairness objective. However, implementing such a design might trigger processes of neighborhood…

The classical paradox of social choice theory asserts that there is no fair way to deterministically select a winner in an election among more than two candidates; the only definite collective preferences are between individual pairs of…

Using the recently proposed model of combinatorial landscapes: local optima networks, we study the distribution of local optima in two classes of instances of the quadratic assignment problem. Our results indicate that the two problem…

We study efficiency in general collective choice problems where agents have ordinal preferences and randomization is allowed. We explore the structure of preference profiles where ex-ante and ex-post efficiency coincide, offer a unifying…

Budgeted uncertainty sets have been established as a major influence on uncertainty modeling for robust optimization problems. A drawback of such sets is that the budget constraint only restricts the global amount of cost increase that can…

Faced with data-driven policies, individuals will manipulate their features to obtain favorable decisions. While earlier works cast these manipulations as undesirable gaming, recent works have adopted a more nuanced causal framing in which…

Crowdsourcing systems aggregate decisions of many people to help users quickly identify high-quality options, such as the best answers to questions or interesting news stories. A long-standing issue in crowdsourcing is how option quality…

Coordination games are important to explain efficient and desirable social behavior. Here we study these games by extensive numerical simulation on networked social structures using an evolutionary approach. We show that local network…

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 $B$,…

This paper focuses on the coordination of a large population of dynamic agents with private information over multiple periods. Each agent maximizes the individual utility, while the coordinator determines the market rule to achieve group…

Two of the main factors shaping an individual's opinion are social coordination and personal preferences, or personal biases. To understand the role of those and that of the topology of the network of interactions, we study an extension of…

We study the problem of {\em impartial selection}, a topic that lies at the intersection of computational social choice and mechanism design. The goal is to select the most popular individual among a set of community members. The input can…

The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how…