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Across income groups and countries, individual citizens perceive economic inequality spectacularly wrong. These misperceptions have far-reaching consequences, as it is perceived inequality, not actualinequality informing redistributive…
Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) is a popular framework for estimating a causal effect in settings where treatment is assigned if an observed covariate exceeds a fixed threshold. We consider estimation and inference in the common…
Partisan gerrymandering poses a threat to democracy. Moreover, the complexity of the districting task may exceed human capacities. One potential solution is using computational models to automate the districting process by optimizing…
The explosion of mobile phone communications in the last years occurs at a moment where data processing power increases exponentially. Thanks to those two changes in a global scale, the road has been opened to use mobile phone…
Reliable statistical information is important to make political decisions on a sound basis and to help measure the impact of policies. Unfortunately, statistics offices in developing countries have scarce resources and statistical censuses…
Synthetic indices are used in Economics to measure various aspects of monetary inequalities. These scalar indices take as input the distribution over a finite population, for example the population of a specific country. In this article we…
We study the problem of non-Bayesian social learning with uncertain models, in which a network of agents seek to cooperatively identify the state of the world based on a sequence of observed signals. In contrast with the existing…
Growth is a multi-layered phenomenon in human societies, composed of socioeconomic and demographic change at many different scales. Yet, standard macroeconomic indicators average over most of these processes, blurring the spatial and…
The analysis of population-wide datasets can provide insight on the health status of large populations so that public health officials can make data-driven decisions. The analysis of such datasets often requires highly parameterized models…
In recent times, neural networks have become a powerful tool for the analysis of complex and abstract data models. However, their introduction intrinsically increases our uncertainty about which features of the analysis are model-related…
The simplified hypothesis that an election is polarized as an explanation of recent electoral outcomes worldwide is centered on perceptions of voting patterns rather than ideological data from the electorate. While the literature focuses on…
Here we focus on the description of the mechanisms behind the process of information aggregation and decision making, a basic step to understand emergent phenomena in society, such as trends, information spreading or the wisdom of crowds.…
Decisions about how the population of the United States should be divided into legislative districts have powerful and not fully understood effects on the outcomes of elections. The problem of understanding what we might mean by "fair…
Can we use data on the biographies of historical figures to estimate the GDP per capita of countries and regions? Here we introduce a machine learning method to estimate the GDP per capita of dozens of countries and hundreds of regions in…
In the United States electoral system, a candidate is elected indirectly by winning a majority of electoral votes cast by individual states, the election usually being decided by the votes cast by a small number of "swing states" where the…
We investigate a state discrimination problem in operationally the most general framework to use a probability, including both classical, quantum theories, and more. In this wide framework, introducing closely related family of ensembles…
Committee-selection problems arise in many contexts and applications, and there has been increasing interest within the social choice research community on identifying which properties are satisfied by different multi-winner voting rules.…
Conjoint experiments randomize multidimensional profiles, offering a powerful design for recovering structural preference parameters -- including marginal rates of substitution, willingness to pay, and the distribution of preferences across…
We use causal inference to study how designing ballots with and without party designations impacts electoral outcomes when partisan voters rely on party-order cues to infer candidate affiliation in races without designations. If the party…
Biometric recognition is used across a variety of applications from cyber security to border security. Recent research has focused on ensuring biometric performance (false negatives and false positives) is fair across demographic groups.…