Related papers: Controlling Elections through Social Influence
Platforms for online civic participation rely heavily on methods for condensing thousands of comments into a relevant handful, based on whether participants agree or disagree with them. These methods should guarantee fair representation of…
In recent years, scholars have raised concerns on the effects that unreliable news, or "fake news," has on our political sphere, and our democracy as a whole. For example, the propagation of fake news on social media is widely believed to…
Influence propagation has been the subject of extensive study due to its important role in social networks, epidemiology, and many other areas. Understanding propagation mechanisms is critical to control the spread of fake news or…
There are many factors that can influence the outcome of an election. We here identify two dominant effects that can affect the votes obtained by a candidate, namely, the Majority Effect and the Media Effect. We mimic these two effects in a…
In this work, we focus on strategies to influence the opinion dynamics of a well-connected society. We propose a generalization of the popular voter model. This variant of the voter model can capture a wide range of individuals including…
The personalization of our news consumption on social media has a tendency to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs instead of balancing our opinions. This finding is a concern for the health of our democracies which rely on an access to…
We study the effects of campaigning, where the society is partitioned into voter clusters and a diffusion process propagates opinions in a network connecting the clusters. Our model is very powerful and can incorporate many campaigning…
The world's digital transformation has influenced not only the way we do business, but also the way we perform daily activities. In fact, the past Presidential elections in the United States as well as those in Great Britain (Brexit) and in…
Weighted voting games are frequently used in decision making. Each voter has a weight and a proposal is accepted if the weight sum of the supporting voters exceeds a quota. One line of research is the efficient computation of so-called…
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…
The spread of rumors in online networks threatens public safety and results in economic losses. To overcome this problem, a lot of work studies the problem of rumor control which aims at limiting the spread of rumors. However, all previous…
In this paper, we study how to shape opinions in social networks when the matrix of interactions is unknown. We consider classical opinion dynamics with some stubborn agents and the possibility of continuously influencing the opinions of a…
How does targeted advertising influence electoral outcomes? This paper presents a one-dimensional spatial model of voting in which a privately informed challenger persuades voters to support him over the status quo. I show that targeted…
Social media platforms are currently the main channel for political messaging, allowing politicians to target specific demographics and adapt based on their reactions. However, making this communication transparent is challenging, as the…
The advent of the digital era provided a fertile ground for the development of virtual societies, complex systems influencing real-world dynamics. Understanding online human behavior and its relevance beyond the digital boundaries is still…
In the face of adverse motives, it is indispensable to achieve a consensus. Elections have been the canonical way by which modern democracy has operated since the 17th century. Nowadays, they regulate markets, provide an engine for modern…
Polarization is a major concern for a well-functioning society. Often, mass polarization of a society is driven by polarizing political representation, even when the latter is easily preventable. The existing computational social choice…
The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…
What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good,…
We study electoral campaign management scenarios in which an external party can buy votes, i.e., pay the voters to promote its preferred candidate in their preference rankings. The external party's goal is to make its preferred candidate a…