Related papers: The Power of Two Choices in Distributed Voting
We consider the following distributed consensus problem: Each node in a complete communication network of size $n$ initially holds an \emph{opinion}, which is chosen arbitrarily from a finite set $\Sigma$. The system must converge toward a…
Consider the decision-making setting where agents elect a panel by expressing both positive and negative preferences. Prominently, in constitutional AI, citizens democratically select a slate of ethical preferences on which a foundation…
We introduce the confident voter model, in which each voter can be in one of two opinions and can additionally have two levels of commitment to an opinion --- confident and unsure. Upon interacting with an agent of a different opinion, a…
Voting is a simple mechanism to aggregate the preferences of agents. Many voting rules have been shown to be NP-hard to manipulate. However, a number of recent theoretical results suggest that this complexity may only be in the worst-case…
We consider a coupled Polya's urn scheme for social dynamics on networks. Agents hold continuum-valued opinions on a two-state issue and randomly converse with their neighbors on a graph, agreeing on one of the two states. The probability…
We study information aggregation in networks when agents interact to learn a binary state of the world. Initially each agent privately observes an independent signal which is "correct" with probability $\frac{1}{2}+\delta$ for some $\delta…
In this paper, we propose a framework to study a general class of strategic behavior in voting, which we call vote operations. We prove the following theorem: if we fix the number of alternatives, generate $n$ votes i.i.d. according to a…
We introduce a socially motivated extension of the voter model in which individual voters are also influenced by two opposing, fixed-opinion news sources. These sources forestall consensus and instead drive the population to a politically…
A compromise process describes the evolution of opinions through binary interactions. Opinions are real numbers, and at each step, two randomly selected agents reach a compromise by averaging their pre-interaction opinions. We prove that if…
Public opinion polling is usually done by random sampling from the entire population, treating individual opinions as independent. In the real world, individuals' opinions are often correlated, e.g., among friends in a social network. In…
This paper studies the evolution of the distribution of opinions in a population of individuals in which there exist two distinct subgroups of highly-committed, well-connected opinion leaders endowed with a strong convincing power. Each…
We derive the distribution of the maximum number of common neighbours of a pair of vertices in a dense random regular graph.The proof involves two important steps. One step is to establish the extremal independence property: the asymptotic…
A most debated topic of the last years is whether simple statistical physics models can explain collective features of social dynamics. A necessary step in this line of endeavour is to find regularities in data referring to large scale…
We consider 3-Majority, a probabilistic consensus dynamics on a complete graph with $n$ vertices, each vertex starting with one of $k$ initial opinions. At each discrete time step, a vertex $u$ is chosen uniformly at random. The selected…
Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. The sources of influence can be generally divided into external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An…
Observational learning is an important information aggregation mechanism. However, it occasionally leads to a state in which an entire population chooses a sub-optimal option. When it occurs and whether it is a phase transition remain…
We study the evolution of majority dynamics with more than two states on the binomial random graph $G(n,p)$. In this process, each vertex has a state in $\{1,\ldots, k\}$, with $k\geq 3$, and at each round every vertex adopts state $i$ if…
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…
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…
The Naming Game is a classic model for studying the emergence and evolution of language within a population. In this paper, we extend the traditional Naming Game model to encompass multiple committed opinions and investigate the system…