Related papers: A Relative Efficiency Gap formula for measuring Po…
Decisions about how the population of the United States should be divided into legislative districts have powerful and not fully understood effects on the outcomes of elections. The problem of understanding what we might mean by "fair…
Using the recently introduced declination function, we estimate the net number of seats won in the US House of Representatives due to asymmetries in vote distributions. Such asymmetries can arise from combinations of partisan gerrymandering…
This paper is to obtain a simple dividing-diagram of the congressional districts, where the only limit is that each district should contain the same population if possibly. In order to solve this problem, we introduce three different…
The problem of guessing a random string is revisited. A close relation between guessing and compression is first established. Then it is shown that if the sequence of distributions of the information spectrum satisfies the large deviation…
We examine the extent of gerrymandering for the 2010 General Assembly district map of Wisconsin. We find that there is substantial variability in the election outcome depending on what maps are used. We also found robust evidence that the…
this paper addresses the issue of the relation between the system efficiency and the individual performance with different combinations of agent memory lengths in mix-game model which is an extension of minority game (MG). In mix-game,…
We initiate a novel direction in randomized social choice by proposing a new definition of agent utility for randomized outcomes. Each agent has a preference over all outcomes and a {\em quantile} parameter. Given a {\em lottery} over the…
Strategic manipulation of elections is typically studied in the context of promoting individual candidates. In parliamentary elections, however, the focus shifts: voters may care more about the overall governing coalition than the…
This preprint offers a detailed look, both qualitative and quantitative, at districting with respect to recent voting patterns in one state: Pennsylvania. We investigate how much the partisan playing field is tilted by political geography.…
Bizarrely shaped voting districts are frequently lambasted as likely instances of gerrymandering. In order to systematically identify such instances, researchers have devised several tests for so-called geographic compactness (i.e., shape…
We introduce the Prediction Advantage (PA), a novel performance measure for prediction functions under any loss function (e.g., classification or regression). The PA is defined as the performance advantage relative to the Bayesian risk…
Proportional apportionment is the problem of assigning seats to parties according to their relative share of votes. Divisor methods are the de-facto standard solution, used in many countries. In recent literature, there are two algorithms…
A decision must often be made between heavy-tailed and Gaussian errors for a regression or a time series model, and the t-distribution is frequently used when it is assumed that the errors are heavy-tailed distributed. The performance of…
Election data represent a precious source of information to study human behavior at a large scale. In proportional elections with open lists, the number of votes received by a candidate, rescaled by the average performance of all…
We axiomatically define a cardinal social inefficiency function, which, given a set of alternatives and individuals' vNM preferences over the alternatives, assigns a unique number -- the social inefficiency -- to each alternative. These…
According to recent reports, the last loopholes in testing Bell's inequality are closed. It is argued that the really important task in this field has not been tackled yet and that the leading experiments claiming to close locality and…
This paper investigates the efficiency of an alternative to ratio estimator under the super population model with uncorrelated errors and a gamma-distributed auxiliary variable. Comparisons with usual ratio and unbiased estimators are also…
Determining the power distribution of the members of a shareholder meeting or a legislative committee is a well-known problem for many applications. In some cases it turns out that power is nearly proportional to relative voting weights,…
What is the value of a single bit to a guesser? We study this problem in a setup where Alice wishes to guess an i.i.d. random vector, and can procure one bit of information from Bob, who observes this vector through a memoryless channel. We…
On the basis of a formula for calculating seat shares and natural thresholds in multidistrict elections under the Jefferson-D'Hondt system and a probabilistic model of electoral behavior based on P\'{o}lya's urn model, we propose a new…