Related papers: Welfare Maximization Entices Participation
We study a model of voting with two alternatives in a symmetric environment. We characterize the interim allocation probabilities that can be implemented by a symmetric voting rule. We show that every such interim allocation probabilities…
We design an expected polynomial-time, truthful-in-expectation, (1-1/e)-approximation mechanism for welfare maximization in a fundamental class of combinatorial auctions. Our results apply to bidders with valuations that are m matroid rank…
What fraction of the potential social surplus in an environment can be extracted by a revenue-maximizing monopolist? We investigate this problem in Bayesian single-parameter environments with independent private values. The precise answer…
There is a growing need for discrete choice models that account for the complex nature of human choices, escaping traditional behavioral assumptions such as the transitivity of pairwise preferences. Recently, several parametric models of…
Winner selection by majority, in an election between two candidates, is the only rule compatible with democratic principles. Instead, when the candidates are three or more and the voters rank candidates in order of preference, there are no…
In this paper, we take a statistical decision-theoretic viewpoint on social choice, putting a focus on the decision to be made on behalf of a system of agents. In our framework, we are given a statistical ranking model, a decision space,…
We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred.…
The von Neumann-Morgenstern (VNM) utility theorem shows that under certain axioms of rationality, decision-making is reduced to maximizing the expectation of some utility function. We extend these axioms to increasingly structured…
An important -- but very demanding -- property in collective decision-making is strategyproofness, which requires that voters cannot benefit from submitting insincere preferences. Gibbard (1977) has shown that only rather unattractive rules…
This study proposes a tractable stochastic choice model to identify motivations for prosocial behavior, and to explore alternative motivations of deliberate randomization beyond ex-ante fairness concerns. To represent social preferences, we…
Participatory budgeting (PB) has been widely adopted and has attracted significant research efforts; however, there is a lack of mechanisms for PB which elicit project interactions, such as substitution and complementarity, from voters.…
Two characterizations of the whole class of strategy-proof aggregation rules on rich domains of locally unimodal preorders in finite median join-semilattices are provided. In particular, it is shown that such a class consists precisely of…
We study group decision making with changing preferences as a Markov Decision Process. We are motivated by the increasing prevalence of automated decision-making systems when making choices for groups of people over time. Our main…
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…
In many social-choice mechanisms the resulting choice is not the most preferred one for some of the participants, thus the need for methods to justify the choice made in a way that improves the acceptance and satisfaction of said…
The use of von Neumann -- Morgenstern utility is examined in the context of multiple choices between lotteries. Different conclusions are reached if the choices are simultaneous or sequential. It is demonstrated that utility cannot be…
We provide and axiomatize a representation for preferences over lotteries that generalizes the expected utility model. Since the representation uses different utility functions to evaluate different lotteries, the preferences can be…
Mechanism design is concerned with settings where a policymaker (or social planner) faces the problem of aggregating the announced preferences of multiple agents into a collective (or social), system-wide decision. One of the most important…
Random utility theory models an agent's preferences on alternatives by drawing a real-valued score on each alternative (typically independently) from a parameterized distribution, and then ranking the alternatives according to scores. A…
The well-known Condorcet Jury Theorem states that, under majority rule, the better of two alternatives is chosen with probability approaching one as the population grows. We study an asymmetric setting where voters face varying…