Related papers: Surprise in Elections

In this paper we propose a novel method to forecast the result of elections using only official results of previous ones. It is based on the voter model with stubborn nodes and uses theoretical results developed in a previous work of ours.…

In recent years online social networks have become increasingly prominent in political campaigns and, concurrently, several countries have experienced shock election outcomes. This paper proposes a model that links these two phenomena. In…

In many social-choice mechanisms the resulting choice is not the most preferred one for some of the participants, thus the need for methods to justify the choice made in a way that improves the acceptance and satisfaction of said…

We study the formation of public opinion in a poll process where the current score is open to public. The voters are assumed to vote probabilistically for or against their own preference considering the group opinion collected up to then in…

We study the voting problem with two alternatives where voters' preferences depend on a not-directly-observable state variable. While equilibria in the one-round voting mechanisms lead to a good decision, they are usually hard to compute…

Election polls play a critical role in political discussions by probing public opinion and enabling political parties to assess their performance before elections. However, traditional polling methods sometimes fail to predict election…

We consider a social choice problem where only a small number of people out of a large population are sufficiently available or motivated to vote. A common solution to increase participation is to allow voters use a proxy, that is, transfer…

Quantitative research relies heavily on coding, and coding errors are relatively common even in published research. In this paper, we examine whether individuals are more or less likely to check their code depending on the results they…

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…

When making decisions under risk, people often exhibit behaviors that classical economic theories cannot explain. Newer models that attempt to account for these irrational behaviors often lack neuroscience bases and require the introduction…

Today, our more-than-ever digital lives leave significant footprints in cyberspace. Large scale collections of these socially generated footprints, often known as big data, could help us to re-investigate different aspects of our social…

Accounting for undecided and uncertain voters is a challenging issue for predicting election results from public opinion polls. Undecided voters typify the uncertainty of swing voters in polls but are often ignored or allocated to each…

Predicting the winner of an election is of importance to multiple stakeholders. To formulate the problem, we consider an independent sequence of categorical data with a finite number of possible outcomes in each. The data is assumed to be…

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:…

Voting is a very general method of preference aggregation. A voting rule takes as input every voter's vote (typically, a ranking of the alternatives), and produces as output either just the winning alternative or a ranking of the…

People are influenced by the choices of others, a phenomenon observed across contexts in the social and behavioral sciences. Social influence can lock in an initial popularity advantage of an option over a higher quality alternative. Yet…

We study the voter model dynamics in the presence of confidence and bias. We assume two types of voters. Unbiased voters whose confidence is indifferent to the state of the voter and biased voters whose confidence is biased towards a common…

Observational data about human behavior is often heterogeneous, i.e., generated by subgroups within the population under study that vary in size and behavior. Heterogeneity predisposes analysis to Simpson's paradox, whereby the trends…

Election rules are formal processes that aggregate voters preferences, typically to select a single candidate, called the winner. Most of the election rules studied in the literature require the voters to rank the candidates from the most…

Elections constitute a paradigm of decision-making problems that have puzzled experts of different disciplines for decades. We study two decision-making problems, where groups make decisions that impact only themselves as a group. In both…