Related papers: Surprise in Elections
Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. The sources of influence can be generally divided into external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An…
In this work, we empirically examine human-AI decision-making in the presence of explanations based on predicted outcomes. This type of explanation provides a human decision-maker with expected consequences for each decision alternative at…
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…
Social choice theory is a theoretical framework for analysis of combining individual preferences, interests, or welfare to reach a collective decision or social welfare in some sense. We introduce a new criterion for social choice protocols…
The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum,…
In a district-based election, we apply a voting rule $r$ to decide the winners in each district, and a candidate who wins in a maximum number of districts is the winner of the election. We present efficient sampling-based algorithms to…
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.…
There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…
The Law of Large Numbers tells us that as the sample size (N) is increased, the sample mean converges on the population mean, provided that the latter exists. In this paper, we investigate the opposite effect: keeping the sample size fixed…
We perform stochastic microsimulations of the dynamics of England and Wales population after the British referendum on EU membership, considering different possible outcomes. Employing available survey data, we model the demographics of the…
In social, economic and cultural situations in which the decisions of individuals are influenced directly by the decisions of others, there appears to be an inherently high level of ex ante unpredictability. In cultural markets such as…
We study a model of a population making a binary decision based on information spreading within the population, which is fully connected or covering a square grid. We assume that a fraction of the population wants to make the choice of the…
Election results are determined by numerous social factors that affect the formation of opinion of the voters, including the network of interactions between them and the dynamics of opinion influence. In this work we study the result of…
Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…
Many democratic countries use district-based elections where there is a "seat" for each district in the governing body. In each district, the party whose candidate gets the maximum number of votes wins the corresponding seat. The result of…
We study elections where voters are faced with the challenge of expressing preferences over an extreme number of issues under consideration. This is largely motivated by emerging blockchain governance systems, which include voters with…
Algorithmic predictions are increasingly informing societal resource allocations by identifying individuals for targeting. Policymakers often build these systems with the assumption that by gathering more observations on individuals, they…
In an election, we are given a set of voters, each having a preference list over a set of candidates, that are distributed on a social network. We consider a scenario where voters may change their preference lists as a consequence of the…
We consider the notions of agreement, diversity, and polarization in ordinal elections (that is, in elections where voters rank the candidates). While (computational) social choice offers good measures of agreement between the voters, such…
Political polls achieve their results by sampling a small number of potential voters rather than the population as a whole. This leads to sampling error which most polling agencies dutifully report. But factors such as nonrepresentative…