Related papers: Controlling Elections through Social Influence
We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…
The paper considers the problem of a leader that seeks to optimally influence the opinions of agents in a directed network through connecting with a limited number of the agents ("direct followers"), possibly in the presence of a fixed…
The outcomes of democratic elections rest on individuals' decision-making that is driven by their varying preferences and beliefs. Individuals may prefer consensus to gridlock, or gridlock to consensus, and information may be fractured via…
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) and Single Transferable Voting (STV) are widely valued; but are complex to understand due to intricate per-round vote transfers. Questions like determining how far a candidate is from winning or identifying…
A long line of work in social psychology has studied variations in people's susceptibility to persuasion -- the extent to which they are willing to modify their opinions on a topic. This body of literature suggests an interesting…
In the past, the Voter Model has been explicitly used to model the impact of propaganda on a dynamic, interconnected population, and certain factors have been identified that influence the behavior of voters when under outside influence.…
Voting is a simple mechanism to combine together the preferences of multiple agents. Agents may try to manipulate the result of voting by mis-reporting their preferences. One barrier that might exist to such manipulation is computational…
We survey some recent developments on the mathematical modeling of opinion dynamics. After an introduction on opinion modeling through interacting multi-agent systems described by partial differential equations of kinetic type, we focus our…
Social media trolling is a powerful tactic to manipulate public opinion on issues with a high moral component. Troll farms, as evidenced in the past, created fabricated content to provoke or silence people to share their opinion on social…
We study how coordinated disinformation campaigns affect elections. We develop a constrained information design model in which a sender deploys uninformative messages that mimic voters' exogenous informative signals. Voters initially…
It is well known that no reasonable voting rule is strategyproof. Moreover, the common Plurality rule is particularly prone to strategic behavior of the voters and empirical studies show that people often vote strategically in practice.…
The dynamics of opinion formation in a society is a complex phenomenon where many variables play an important role. Recently, the influence of algorithms to filter which content is fed to social networks users has come under scrutiny.…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting and, in scenarios such as committee or board elections, employing voting rules that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent submits a…
In liquid democracy, agents can either vote directly or delegate their vote to a different agent of their choice. This results in a power structure in which certain agents possess more voting weight than others. As a result, it opens up…
The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…
We study the utilitarian distortion of social choice mechanisms under the recently proposed learning-augmented framework where some (possibly unreliable) predicted information about the preferences of the agents is given as input. In…
Electing leader is a vital issue not only in distributed computing but also in communication network [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], centralized mutual exclusion algorithm [6, 7], centralized control IPC, etc. A leader is required to make synchronization…
In many coalition formation games the utility of the agents depends on a social network. In such scenarios there might be a manipulative agent that would like to manipulate his connections in the social network in order to increase his…
We address the link between the controllability or observability of a stochastic complex system and concepts of information theory. We show that the most influential degrees of freedom can be detected without acting on the system, by…