Related papers: Measuring voting power in convex policy spaces
Computational Politics is the study of computational methods to analyze and moderate users' behaviors related to political activities such as election campaign persuasion, political affiliation, and opinion mining. With the rapid…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
Applied work often studies the effect of a binary variable ("treatment") using linear models with additive effects. I study the interpretation of the OLS estimands in such models when treatment effects are heterogeneous. I show that the…
Participatory budgeting refers to the practice of allocating public resources by collecting and aggregating individual preferences. Most existing studies in this field often assume an additive utility function, where each individual holds a…
The legitimacy of bottom-up democratic processes for the distribution of public funds by policy-makers is challenging and complex. Participatory budgeting is such a process, where voting outcomes may not always be fair or inclusive.…
Factor analysis refers to a statistical model in which observed variables are conditionally independent given fewer hidden variables, known as factors, and all the random variables follow a multivariate normal distribution. The parameter…
We show how voting may be viewed naturally from an algebraic perspective by viewing voting profiles as elements of certain well-studied $\mathbb{Q}S_n$-modules. By using only a handful of simple combinatorial objects (e.g., tabloids) and…
This paper proposes a framework for categorizing economic policies in a form of a tree taxonomy. The purpose of this approach is to construct an exhaustive and standardized list of actions that a governing authority has access to and can…
Econometric inference allows an analyst to back out the values of agents in a mechanism from the rules of the mechanism and bids of the agents. This paper gives an algorithm to solve the problem of inferring the values of agents in a…
Important decisions are likely made by groups of agents. Thus group decision making is very common in practice. Very transparent group aggregating rules are given by weighted voting, where each agent is assigned a weight. Here a proposal is…
Causal mediation analysis seeks to determine whether an independent variable affects a response variable directly or whether it does so indirectly, by way of a mediator. The existing statistical tests to determine the existence of an…
An important issue for many economic experiments is how the experimenter can ensure sufficient power for rejecting one or more hypotheses. Here, we apply methods developed mainly within the area of clinical trials for testing multiple…
We consider the set of the power non-negative polynomials of several variables and its subset that consists of polynomials which can be represented as a sum of squares. It is shown in the classic work by D.Hilbert that it is a proper…
This paper describes a new information-theoretic policy evaluation technique for reinforcement learning. This technique converts any compression or density model into a corresponding estimate of value. Under appropriate stationarity and…
The study of convex functions - in particular, of their optimization (really minimization) is one of the most important fields of applied mathematics. Convexity seems to be one of those incredibly well-chosen hypotheses which is just…
There is a class of models for pol/mil/econ bargaining and conflict that is loosely based on the Median Voter Theorem which has been used with great success for about 30 years. However, there are fundamental mathematical limitations to…
When two selection environments operate upon each other, mutual shaping in a co-evolution along a particular trajectory is one possible outcome. When three selection environments are involved, more complex dynamics can be expected as a…
The area of population dynamics has a rich history of the development and analysis of models of biological and social phenomena using ordinary differential equations. This paper describes a method for understanding the influence one…
In decision-making problems under uncertainty, probabilistic constraints are a valuable tool to express safety of decisions. They result from taking the probability measure of a given set of random inequalities depending on the decision…
Evaluation of counterfactual queries (e.g., "If A were true, would C have been true?") is important to fault diagnosis, planning, determination of liability, and policy analysis. We present a method of revaluating counterfactuals when the…