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We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are…
An important problem in computational social choice theory is the complexity of undesirable behavior among agents, such as control, manipulation, and bribery in election systems. These kinds of voting strategies are often tempting at the…
We study how office-seeking parties use direct democracy to shape elections. A party with a strong electoral base can benefit from using a binding referendum to resolve issues that divide its core supporters. When referendums do not bind,…
Direct democracy is often proposed as a possible solution to the 21st-century problems of democracy. However, this suggestion clashes with the size and complexity of 21st-century societies, entailing an excessive cognitive burden on voters,…
To make a joint decision, agents (or voters) are often required to provide their preferences as linear orders. To determine a winner, the given linear orders can be aggregated according to a voting protocol. However, in realistic settings,…
When selecting multiple candidates based on approval preferences of agents, the proportional representation of agents' opinions is an important and well-studied desideratum. Existing criteria for evaluating the representativeness of…
We study a model of consensus decision making, in which a finite group of Bayesian agents has to choose between one of two courses of action. Each member of the group has a private and independent signal at his or her disposal, giving some…
We propose an e-voting protocol that seems to allow citizens to verify that their vote has been accurately taken into account while preserving its secrecy, without requiring the use of a complex process. The main idea is to give each voter…
In voting contexts, some new candidates may show up in the course of the process. In this case, we may want to determine which of the initial candidates are possible winners, given that a fixed number $k$ of new candidates will be added. We…
We consider collective decision making when the society consists of groups endowed with voting weights. Each group chooses an internal rule that specifies the allocation of its weight to the alternatives as a function of its members'…
We investigate efficient ways for the incorporation of liquid democracy into election settings in which voters submit cumulative ballots, i.e., when each voter is assigned a virtual coin that she can then distribute as she wishes among the…
We consider the problem of predicting winners in elections, for the case where we are given complete knowledge about all possible candidates, all possible voters (together with their preferences), but where it is uncertain either which…
The voter model has been studied extensively as a paradigmatic opinion dynamics' model. However, its ability for modeling real opinion dynamics has not been addressed. We introduce a noisy voter model (accounting for social influence) with…
Recommender systems have been successfully applied to assist decision making by producing a list of item recommendations tailored to user preferences. Traditional recommender systems only focus on optimizing the utility of the end users who…
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:…
Participatory budgeting is one of the exciting developments in deliberative grassroots democracy. We concentrate on approval elections and propose proportional representation axioms in participatory budgeting, by generalizing relevant…
Democracy in a state is possibly a gain to have the government that represents the whole citizens. But the main element of the democratic system is the ability of the governmental functions in the state to act properly in order to gain the…
We consider a setting with agents that have preferences over alternatives and are partitioned into disjoint districts. The goal is to choose one alternative as the winner using a mechanism which first decides a representative alternative…
Proponents of participatory democracy praise Liquid Democracy: decisions are taken by referendum, but voters delegate their votes freely. When better informed voters are present, delegation can increase the probability of a correct…
The paper considers the problem of finding the number of dominant voters in two-level voting procedures. At the first stage, voting is conducted among local groups of voters, and at the second stage, the results are aggregated to form a…