Related papers: Modularity and Optimality in Social Choice
Consider an urn filled with balls, each labeled with one of several possible collective decisions. Now, let a random voter draw two balls from the urn and pick her more preferred as the collective decision. Relabel the losing ball with the…
Nature provides us with abundant examples of how large numbers of individuals can make decisions without the coordination of a central authority. Social insects, birds, fishes, and many other living collectives, rely on simple interaction…
Advancing our understanding of human behavior hinges on the ability of theories to unveil the mechanisms underlying such behaviors. Measuring the ability of theories and models to predict unobserved behaviors provides a principled method to…
Tournaments are a widely used mechanism to rank alternatives in a noisy environment. This paper investigates a fundamental issue of economics in tournament design: what is the best usage of limited resources, that is, how should the…
Modularity was introduced as a measure of goodness for the community structure induced by a partition of the set of vertices in a graph. Then, it also became an objective function used to find good partitions, with high success.…
The mathematical study of voting, social choice theory, has traditionally only been applicable to choices among a few predetermined alternatives, but not to open-ended decisions such as collectively selecting a textual statement. We…
Our model describes competition between groups driven by the choices of self-interested voters within groups. Within a Poisson voting environment, parties observe aggregate support from groups and can allocate prizes or punishments to them.…
Consider an important meeting to be held in a team-based organization. Taking availability constraints into account, an online scheduling poll is being used in order to decide upon the exact time of the meeting. Decisions are to be taken…
Ranking over sets arise when users choose between groups of items. For example, a group may be of those movies deemed $5$ stars to them, or a customized tour package. It turns out, to model this data type properly, we need to investigate…
The study of community structure has been a hot topic of research over the last years. But, while successfully applied in several areas, the concept lacks of a general and precise notion. Facts like the hierarchical structure and…
In this work we introduce a new model of decision-making by agents in a social network. Agents have innate preferences over the strategies but, because of the social interactions, the decision of the agents are not only affected by their…
This paper investigates the social optimum for a dynamic linear quadratic collective choice problem where a group of agents choose among multiple alternatives or destinations. The agents' common objective is to minimize the average cost of…
Ethnocentrism is a behavioral strategy seen on every scale of social interaction. Game-theory models demonstrate that evolution selects ethnocentrism because it boosts cooperation, which increases reproductive fitness. However, some believe…
Communities are clusters of nodes with a higher than average density of internal connections. Their detection is of great relevance to better understand the structure and hierarchies present in a network. Modularity has become a standard…
We introduce a two layer network model for social coordination incorporating two relevant ingredients: a) different networks of interaction to learn and to obtain a payoff , and b) decision making processes based both on social and…
Social choice is the theory about collective decision towards social welfare starting from individual opinions, preferences, interests or welfare. The field of Computational Social Welfare is somewhat recent and it is gaining impact in the…
We introduce a new threshold model of social networks, in which the nodes influenced by their neighbours can adopt one out of several alternatives. We characterize social networks for which adoption of a product by the whole network is…
In a multi-party machine learning system, different parties cooperate on optimizing towards better models by sharing data in a privacy-preserving way. A major challenge in learning is the incentive issue. For example, if there is…
In this paper, we reconsider the spin model suggested recently to understand some features of collective decision making among higher organisms [A.T. Hartnett et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 116 (2016) 038701]. Within the model, the state of an…
The community structure of a complex network can be determined by finding the partitioning of its nodes that maximizes modularity. Many of the proposed algorithms for doing this work by recursively bisecting the network. We show that this…