Related papers: Reality-Aware Social Choice
Facing an unknown situation, a person may not be able to firmly elicit his/her preferences over different alternatives, so he/she tends to express uncertain preferences. Given a community of different persons expressing their preferences…
A cornerstone of social choice theory is Condorcet's paradox which says that in an election where $n$ voters rank $m$ candidates it is possible that, no matter which candidate is declared the winner, a majority of voters would have…
AI alignment, the challenge of ensuring AI systems act in accordance with human values, has emerged as a critical problem in the development of systems such as foundation models and recommender systems. Still, the current dominant approach,…
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.…
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…
When scheduling public works or events in a shared facility one needs to accommodate preferences of a population. We formalize this problem by introducing the notion of a collective schedule. We show how to extend fundamental tools from…
Understanding the nature of strategic voting is the holy grail of social choice theory, where game-theory, social science and recently computational approaches are all applied in order to model the incentives and behavior of voters. In a…
Most social choice rules assume access to full rankings, while current alignment practice -- despite aiming for diversity -- typically treats voters as anonymous and comparisons as independent, effectively extracting only about one bit per…
We investigate opinion dynamics in multi-agent networks when a bias toward one of two possible opinions exists; for example, reflecting a status quo vs a superior alternative. Starting with all agents sharing an initial opinion representing…
Theoretical results underpinning the Wisdom of Crowds, such as the Condorcet Jury Theorem, point to substantial accuracy gains through aggregation of decisions or opinions, but the foundations of this theorem are routinely undermined in…
When can a majority of voters find common ground, that is, a position they all agree upon? How does the shape of the political spectrum influence the outcome? When mathematical objects have a social interpretation, the associated theorems…
Epistemic social choice aims at unveiling a hidden ground truth given votes, which are interpreted as noisy signals about it. We consider here a simple setting where votes consist of approval ballots: each voter approves a set of…
This mini-review presents extensions of the voter model that incorporate various plausible features of real decision-making processes by individuals. Although these generalizations are not calibrated by empirical data, the resulting…
We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two alternatives at…
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…
Referring to a standard context of voting theory, and to the classic notion of voting situation, here we show that it is possible to observe any arbitrary set of elections' outcomes, no matter how paradoxical it may appear. On this purpose…
May's Theorem (1952), a celebrated result in social choice, provides the foundation for majority rule. May's crucial assumption of symmetry, often thought of as a procedural equity requirement, is violated by many choice procedures that…
We introduce an evolutionary game with feedback between perception and reality, which we call the reality game. It is a game of chance in which the probabilities for different objective outcomes (e.g., heads or tails in a coin toss) depend…
Algorithmic fairness in recommender systems requires close attention to the needs of a diverse set of stakeholders that may have competing interests. Previous work in this area has often been limited by fixed, single-objective definitions…
People care about decision outcomes and how decisions get made, both when making decisions and reflecting on decisions. But formalizing the full range of normative concerns that drive decisions is an open challenge. We introduce Axiomatic…