Related papers: Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legi…
Parliaments dominated by two political blocs often face legislative inefficiencies as polarization increases. A central institutional question concerns how majority and supermajority rules interact with parliamentary composition to balance…
In this paper we discuss the problems of modern representative democracy and we look at the selection of legislators by lot as a way to tame some of the drawbacks of that system. It is recalled at the beginning that resorting to sortition…
We design two mechanisms that ensure that the majority preferred option wins in all equilibria. The first one is a simultaneous game where agents choose other agents to cooperate with on top of the vote for an alternative, thus overcoming…
In this paper we focus on the beneficial role of random strategies in social sciences by means of simple mathematical and computational models. We briefly review recent results obtained by two of us in previous contributions for the case of…
Strategic manipulation of elections is typically studied in the context of promoting individual candidates. In parliamentary elections, however, the focus shifts: voters may care more about the overall governing coalition than the…
In parliamentary elections, parties compete for a limited, typically fixed number of seats. Most parliaments are assembled using apportionment methods that distribute the seats based on the parties' vote counts. Common apportionment methods…
We study a version of the minority game in which one agent is allowed to join the game in a random fashion. It is shown that in the crowded regime, i.e., for small values of the memory size $m$ of the agents in the population, the agent…
We study the problem of selecting a member of a set of agents based on impartial nominations by agents from that set. The problem was studied previously by Alon et al. and Holzman and Moulin and has important applications in situations…
Liquid democracy is the principle of making collective decisions by letting agents transitively delegate their votes. Despite its significant appeal, it has become apparent that a weakness of liquid democracy is that a small subset of…
Agents vote to choose a fair mixture of public outcomes; each agent likes or dislikes each outcome. We discuss three outstanding voting rules. The Conditional Utilitarian rule, a variant of the random dictator, is Strategyproof and…
The quality of governance of institutions, corporations and countries depends on the ability of efficient decision making within the respective boards or cabinets. Opinion formation processes within groups are size dependent. It is often…
We present an alternative voting system that aims at bridging the gap between proportional representative systems and majoritarian, single winner election systems. The system lets people vote for multiple parties, but then assigns each…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interference by third parties. For example, suppose votes have been cast in an election between two candidates, and then each vote is randomly changed with a small…
Can artificial agents benefit from human conventions? Human societies manage to successfully self-organize and resolve the tragedy of the commons in common-pool resources, in spite of the bleak prediction of non-cooperative game theory. On…
We propose a dynamic allocation procedure that increases power and efficiency when measuring an average treatment effect in sequential randomized trials. Subjects arrive iteratively and are either randomized or paired via a matching…
Peer reviews, evaluations, and selections are a fundamental aspect of modern science. Funding bodies the world over employ experts to review and select the best proposals from those submitted for funding. The problem of peer selection,…
Our goal is to solve both problems of adverse selection and moral hazard for multi-agent projects. In our model, each selected agent can work according to his private "capability tree". This means a process involving hidden actions, hidden…
In many proportional parliamentary elections, electoral thresholds (typically 3-5%) are used to promote stability and governability by preventing the election of parties with very small representation. However, these thresholds often result…
Apportionment is the act of distributing the seats of a legislature among political parties (or states) in proportion to their vote shares (or populations). A famous impossibility by Balinski and Young (2001) shows that no apportionment…