Related papers: Election turnout statistics in many countries: sim…
We propose a stochastic model of opinion exchange in networks. A finite set of agents is organized in a fixed network structure. There is a binary state of the world and each agent receives a private signal on the state. We model beliefs as…
We give an overview of the diverse electoral systems used in local, national, or super-national elections around the world. We discuss existing methods for selecting single and multiple winners and give real-world examples for some more…
Elections, specially in countries such as Brazil with an electorate of the order of 100 million people, yield large-scale data-sets embodying valuable information on the dynamics through which individuals influence each other and make…
The Hotelling-Downs model considers parties changing policy to maximise their vote-share. Where policy position lies on a left-right axis, it describes a tendency for political parties to move towards centrist platforms. This is in contrast…
Typical voting rules do not work well in settings with many candidates. If there are just several hundred candidates, then even a simple task such as choosing a top candidate becomes impractical. Motivated by the hope of developing group…
In this paper, we consider the voter model with popularity bias. The influence of each node on its neighbors depends on its degree. We find the consensus probabilities and expected consensus times for each of the states. We also find the…
We present theoretical and empirical results demonstrating the usefulness of voting rules for participatory democracies. We first give algorithms which efficiently elicit \epsilon-approximations to two prominent voting rules: the Borda rule…
Ignoring the differences between countries, human reproductive and dispersal behaviors can be described by some standardized models, so whether there is a universal law of population growth hidden in the abundant and unstructured data from…
Surveillance data serving for epidemic alert systems are typically fully aggregated in space. However, epidemics may be spatially heterogeneous, undergoing distinct dynamics in distinct regions of the surveillance area. We unveil this in…
The well-known Condorcet Jury Theorem states that, under majority rule, the better of two alternatives is chosen with probability approaching one as the population grows. We study an asymmetric setting where voters face varying…
We develop a multiple-events model and exploit within and between country variation in the timing, type and level of intensity of various public policies to study their dynamic effects on the daily incidence of COVID-19 and on population…
The rate of adoption of new information depends on reinforcement from multiple sources in a way that often cannot be described by simple contagion processes. In such cases, contagion is said to be complex. Complex contagion happens in the…
The distribution of numbers in human documents is determined by a variety of diverse natural and human factors, whose relative significance can be evaluated by studying the numbers' frequency of occurrence. Although it has been studied…
Since Downs proposed that the act of voting is irrational in 1957, myriad models have been proposed to explain voting and account for observed turnout patterns. We propose a model in which partisans consider both the instrumental and…
We consider elections where the voters come one at a time, in a streaming fashion, and devise space-efficient algorithms which identify an approximate winning committee with respect to common multiwinner proportional representation voting…
We initiate the work towards a comprehensive picture of the smoothed satisfaction of voting axioms, to provide a finer and more realistic foundation for comparing voting rules. We adopt the smoothed social choice framework, where an…
We consider distributed elections, where there is a center and $k$ sites. In such distributed elections, each voter has preferences over some set of candidates, and each voter is assigned to exactly one site such that each site is aware…
Cultural values vary significantly around the world. Despite a large heterogeneity, similarities across national cultures are present. This paper studies cross-country culture heterogeneity via the joint inference of country-specific copula…
The voter model and the Axelrod model are two of the main stochastic processes that describe the spread of opinions on networks. The former includes social influence, the tendency of individuals to become more similar when they interact,…
Contributing to the toolbox for interpreting election results, we evaluate the robustness of election winners to random noise. We compare the robustness of different voting rules and evaluate the robustness of real-world election winners…