Related papers: Measuring voting power in convex policy spaces
Active inference has emerged as an alternative approach to control problems given its intuitive (probabilistic) formalism. However, despite its theoretical utility, computational implementations have largely been restricted to…
How can we explain the predictions of a black-box model? In this paper, we use influence functions -- a classic technique from robust statistics -- to trace a model's prediction through the learning algorithm and back to its training data,…
Our preferences depend on the circumstances in which we reveal them. We will introduce a dependency which allows us to illustrate the relation between the possibility of winning of particular candidates in a quantum election and the type of…
We study the dynamics of public opinion in a model in which agents change their opinions as a result of random binary encounters if the opinion difference is below their individual thresholds that evolve over time. We ground these…
Participatory budgeting is a democratic approach to deciding the funding of public projects, which has been adopted in many cities across the world. We present a survey of research on participatory budgeting emerging from the computational…
Visual statistical inference is a way to determine significance of patterns found while exploring data. It is dependent on the evaluation of a lineup, of a data plot among a sample of null plots, by human observers. Each individual is…
Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its…
Evaluation is the central means for assessing, understanding, and communicating about NLP models. In this position paper, we argue evaluation should be more than that: it is a force for driving change, carrying a sociological and political…
In a signed graph, each link is labeled with either a positive or a negative sign. This is particularly appropriate to model polarized systems. Such a graph can be characterized through the notion of structural balance, which relies on the…
Extension problems for polynomial valuations on different cones of convex functions are investigated. It is shown that for the classes of functions under consideration, the extension problem reduces to a simple geometric obstruction on the…
This paper offers a synthesis of the empirical literature on the effects of monetary policy. Using the findings from an extensive collection of meta-analyses, it evaluates the effectiveness of conventional and unconventional monetary policy…
The related concepts of partisan belief systems, issue alignment, and partisan sorting are central to our understanding of politics. These phenomena have been studied using measures of alignment between pairs of topics, or how much…
In democracies, major policy decisions typically require some form of majority or consensus, so elites must secure mass support to govern. Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass…
We investigate a dynamical model of opinion formation in which an individual's opinion is influenced by interactions with a group of other agents. We introduce a bias towards one of the opinions in a manner not considered earlier to the…
Selection as Power argued that upstream selection authority, rather than internal objective misalignment, constitutes a primary source of risk in high-stakes agentic systems. However, the original framework was static: governance…
In recent years, enlargement of the European Union has led to increased interest in the allocation of voting weights to member states with hugely differing population numbers. While the eventually agreed voting scheme lacks any strict…
Two of the main factors shaping an individual's opinion are social coordination and personal preferences, or personal biases. To understand the role of those and that of the topology of the network of interactions, we study an extension of…
I devise a novel approach to evaluate the effectiveness of fiscal policy in the short run with multi-category treatment effects and inverse probability weighting based on the potential outcome framework. This study's main contribution to…
When language models answer open-ended problems, they implicitly make hidden decisions that shape their outputs, leaving users with uncontextualized answers rather than a working map of the problem; drawing on multiverse analysis from…
We revisit and generalize the concept of composite likelihood as a method to make a probabilistic inference by aggregation of multiple Bayesian agents, thereby defining a class of predictive models which we call composite Bayesian. This…