Related papers: Sample Complexity for Winner Prediction in Electio…
In many real world elections, agents are not required to rank all candidates. We study three of the most common methods used to modify voting rules to deal with such partial votes. These methods modify scoring rules (like the Borda count),…
In multiagent settings where the agents have different preferences, preference aggregation is a central issue. Voting is a general method for preference aggregation, but seminal results have shown that all general voting protocols are…
The goal of machine learning is to find models that minimize prediction error on data that has not yet been seen. Its operational paradigm assumes access to a dataset $S$ and articulates a scheme for evaluating how well a given model…
This paper studies the sample complexity of searching over multiple populations. We consider a large number of populations, each corresponding to either distribution P0 or P1. The goal of the search problem studied here is to find one…
Complexity of voting manipulation is a prominent topic in computational social choice. In this work, we consider a two-stage voting manipulation scenario. First, a malicious party (an attacker) attempts to manipulate the election outcome in…
A key promise of democratic voting is that, by accounting for all constituents' preferences, it produces decisions that benefit the constituency overall. It is alarming, then, that all deterministic voting rules have unbounded distortion:…
We consider the problem of estimating the number of distinct elements in a large data set (or, equivalently, the support size of the distribution induced by the data set) from a random sample of its elements. The problem occurs in many…
Issue salience is a major determinant in voters' decisions. Candidates and political parties campaign to shift salience to their advantage - a process termed priming. We study the dynamics, strategies and equilibria of campaign spending for…
We consider the algorithmic question of choosing a subset of candidates of a given size $k$ from a set of $m$ candidates, with knowledge of voters' ordinal rankings over all candidates. We consider the well-known and classic scoring rule…
Much research in electoral control -- one of the most studied form of electoral attacks, in which an entity running an election alters the structure of that election to yield a preferred outcome -- has focused on giving decision complexity…
The delta method is a popular and elementary tool for deriving limiting distributions of transformed statistics, while applications of asymptotic distributions do not allow one to obtain desirable accuracy of approximation for tail…
Decision procedures aggregating the preferences of multiple agents can produce cycles and hence outcomes which have been described heuristically as `chaotic'. We make this description precise by constructing an explicit dynamical system…
The Eurovision Song Contest is a popular annual international song competition organized by the European Broadcasting Union. The winner is decided by the audience and expert juries from each participating nation, which is why the analysis…
Voting is the aggregation of individual preferences in order to select a winning alternative. Selection of a winner is accomplished via a voting rule, e.g., rank-order voting, majority rule, plurality rule, approval voting. Which voting…
Experimental comparisons of performance represent an important aspect of research on optimization algorithms. In this work we present a methodology for defining the required sample sizes for designing experiments with desired statistical…
We study a fundamental stochastic selection problem involving $n$ independent random variables, each of which can be queried at some cost. Given a tolerance level $\delta$, the goal is to find a value that is $\delta$-approximately minimum…
Randomized approximation algorithms for many #P-complete problems (such as the partition function of a Gibbs distribution, the volume of a convex body, the permanent of a $\{0,1\}$-matrix, and many others) reduce to creating random…
We study the committee selection problem in the canonical impartial culture model with a large number of voters and an even larger candidate set. Here, each voter independently reports a uniformly random preference order over the…
We consider the complexity of deciding the winner of an election under the Slater rule. In this setting we are given a tournament $T = (V, A)$, where the vertices of V represent candidates and the direction of each arc indicates which of…
A Condorcet winning set addresses the Condorcet paradox by selecting a few candidates--rather than a single winner--such that no unselected alternative is preferred to all of them by a majority of voters. This idea extends to…