Related papers: The probability of the Alabama paradox
Most democratic countries use election methods to transform election results into whole numbers which usually give the number of seats in a legislative body the parties obtained. Which election method does this best can be specified by…
Consider an election where N seats are distributed among parties with proportions p_1,...,p_m of the votes. We study, for the common divisor and quota methods, the asymptotic distribution, and in particular the mean, of the seat excess of a…
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…
Several Artificial Intelligence schemes for reasoning under uncertainty explore either explicitly or implicitly asymmetries among probabilities of various states of their uncertain domain models. Even though the correct working of these…
We study two types of probability measures on the set of integer partitions of $n$ with at most $m$ parts. The first one chooses the random partition with a chance related to its largest part only. We then obtain the limiting distributions…
Apportionment is the problem of distributing $h$ indivisible seats across states in proportion to the states' populations. In the context of the US House of Representatives, this problem has a rich history and is a prime example of…
The superiority of symplectic methods for stochastic Hamiltonian systems has been widely recognized, yet the probabilistic mechanism behind this superiority remains incompletely understood. This paper studies the superiority of symplectic…
An assembly of $n$ voters needs to decide on $t$ independent binary issues. Each voter has opinions about the issues, given by a $t$-bit vector. Anscombe's paradox shows that a policy following the majority opinion in each issue may not…
The paper substantiates the conjecture of the asymptotic behavior of the largest distance between consecutive primes: $sup_{p_i \leq x}(p_{i+1}-p_i) \sim 2e^{-\gamma} \log^2(x)$, where $\gamma$ is the Euler constant. The Hardy-Littlewood…
The well-known Simpson's Paradox, or Yule-Simpson Effect, in statistics is often illustrated by the following thought experiment: A drug may be found in a trial to increase the survival rate for both men and women, but decrease the rate for…
This paper describes Simpson's paradox, and explains its serious implications for randomised control trials. In particular, we show that for any number of variables we can simulate the result of a controlled trial which uniformly points to…
We present a technique to study normalizing strategies when termination is asymptotic, that is, it appears as a limit, as opposite to reaching a normal form in a finite number of steps. Asymptotic termination occurs in several settings,…
The halting problem for Turing machines is decidable on a set of asymptotic probability one. Specifically, there is a set B of Turing machine programs such that (i) B has asymptotic probability one, so that as the number of states n…
The problem of how to allocate to states the seats in the US House of Representatives is the most studied instance of what is termed the `apportionment problem'. We propose a new method of apportionment which is stochastic, which meets the…
How to fairly apportion congressional seats to states has been debated for centuries. We present an alternative perspective on apportionment, centered not on states but "families" of state, sets of states with "divisor-method" quotas with…
The occurrence of Simpson's paradox (SP) in $2\times 2$ contingency tables has been well studied. The present work comprehensively revisits this problem using a combination of philosophical reflections, causal considerations, and…
Apportionment assigns indivisible items among groups. By the Balinski-Young theorem, no method can satisfy both house monotonicity and the quota rule. This paper investigates quota violations caused by nonzero allocation constraints, and…
Representation theory of finite groups portrays a marvelous crossroad of group theory, algebraic combinatorics, and probability. In particular the Plancherel measure is a probability that arises naturally from representation theory, and in…
For chaotic systems there is a theory for the decay of the survival probability, and for the parametric dependence of the local density of states. This theory leads to the distinction between "perturbative" and "non-perturbative" regimes,…
Hamiltonian mixed systems with unbounded phase space are typically characterized by two asymptotic algebraic laws: decay of recurrence time statistics ($\gamma$) and superdiffusion ($\beta$). We conjecture the universal exponents…