Related papers: Welfare Maximization Entices Participation
We consider social welfare functions that satisfy Arrow's classic axioms of independence of irrelevant alternatives and Pareto optimality when the outcome space is the convex hull of some finite set of alternatives. Individual and…
We present theoretical and empirical results demonstrating the usefulness of voting rules for participatory democracies. We first give algorithms which efficiently elicit \epsilon-approximations to two prominent voting rules: the Borda rule…
In social choice theory with ordinal preferences, a voting method satisfies the axiom of positive involvement if adding to a preference profile a voter who ranks an alternative uniquely first cannot cause that alternative to go from winning…
We consider a simple sequential allocation procedure for sharing indivisible items between agents in which agents take turns to pick items. Supposing additive utilities and independence between the agents, we show that the expected utility…
We develop a preference elicitation method for a Von Neumann-Morgenstern (VNM)-type decision-maker from pairwise comparison data in the presence of response errors. We apply the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method to jointly elicit…
Based on the observation that many existing discrete choice models admit a welfare function of utilities whose gradient gives the choice probability vector, we propose a new representation of discrete choice model which we call the…
Are there voting methods which (i) give everyone, including minorities, an equal share of effective power even if voters act strategically, (ii) promote consensus rather than polarization and inequality, and (iii) do not favour the status…
We study the problem of selection in the context of Bayesian persuasion. We are given multiple agents with hidden values (or quality scores), to whom resources must be allocated by a welfare-maximizing decision-maker. An intermediary with…
In recent years, research in Participatory Budgeting (PB) has put a greater emphasis on rules satisfying notions of fairness and proportionality, with the Method of Equal Shares (MES) being a prominent example. However, proportionality can…
Condorcet's paradox is a fundamental result in social choice theory which states that there exist elections in which, no matter which candidate wins, a majority of voters prefer a different candidate. In fact, even if we can select any $k$…
Consider the seller's problem of finding optimal prices for her $n$ (divisible) goods when faced with a set of $m$ consumers, given that she can only observe their purchased bundles at posted prices, i.e., revealed preferences. We study…
We investigate the power of randomness in the context of a fundamental Bayesian optimal mechanism design problem--a single seller aims to maximize expected revenue by allocating multiple kinds of resources to "unit-demand" agents with…
Two prominent objectives in social choice are utilitarian - maximizing the sum of agents' utilities, and leximin - maximizing the smallest agent's utility, then the second-smallest, etc. Utilitarianism is typically computationally easier to…
As the driving force of crowdsourcing is the interaction among participants, various incentive mechanisms have been proposed to attract sufficient participants. However, the existing works assume that all the providers always meet the…
We study the design of voting mechanisms in a binary social choice environment where agents' cardinal valuations are independent but not necessarily identically distributed. The mechanism must be anonymous -- the outcome is invariant to…
In frequently repeated matching scenarios, individuals may require diversification in their choices. Therefore, when faced with a set of potential outcomes, each individual may have an ideal lottery over outcomes that represents their…
The relationship of policy choice by majority voting and by maximization of utilitarian welfare has long been discussed. I consider choice between a status quo and a proposed policy when persons have interpersonally comparable cardinal…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process for allocating funds to projects based on the votes of members of the community. Different rules have been used to aggregate participants' votes. Past research has studied the trade-off…
Using both single-index measures and stochastic dominance concepts, we show how Bayesian inference can be used to make multivariate welfare comparisons. A four-dimensional distribution for the well-being attributes income, mental health,…
One of the central economic paradigms in multi-agent systems is that agents should not be better off by acting dishonestly. In the context of collective decision-making, this axiom is known as strategyproofness and turns out to be rather…