Related papers: Surprise in Elections
In a country with many elections, it may prove economically expedient to hold multiple elections simultaneously on a common polling date. We show that in a polarized society, in which each voter has a preferred party, an increase in the…
The increasing cost of electoral campaigns raises the need for effective campaign planning and a precise understanding of the return of such investment. Interestingly, despite the strong impact of elections on our daily lives, how this…
Wisdom of the crowd revealed a striking fact that the majority answer from a crowd is often more accurate than any individual expert. We observed the same story in machine learning--ensemble methods leverage this idea to combine multiple…
The question of how people vote strategically under uncertainty has attracted much attention in several disciplines. Theoretical decision models have been proposed which vary in their assumptions on the sophistication of the voters and on…
Surprisal theory links human processing effort to the predictability of an upcoming linguistic unit, but empirical work often leaves the notion of a unit underspecified. In practice, experimental stimuli are segmented into linguistically…
Political elections are one of the most significant aspects of what constitutes the fabric of the United States. In recent history, typical polling estimates have largely lacked precision in predicting election outcomes, which has not only…
With the rising participation of the common mass in social media, it is increasingly common now for policymakers/journalists to create online polls on social media to understand the political leanings of people in specific locations. The…
Typical voting rules do not work well in settings with many candidates. If there are just several hundred candidates, then even a simple task such as choosing a top candidate becomes impractical. Motivated by the hope of developing group…
Decisions taken in our everyday lives are based on a wide variety of information so it is generally very difficult to assess what are the strategies that guide us. Stock market therefore provides a rich environment to study how people take…
We study the voting game where agents' preferences are endogenously decided by the information they receive, and they can collaborate in a group. We show that strategic voting behaviors have a positive impact on leading to the ``correct''…
We suggest that one individual holds multiple degrees of belief about an outcome, given the evidence. We then investigate the implications of such noisy probabilities for a buyer and a seller of binary options and find the odds agreed upon…
This paper proposed a methodology to forecast electoral outcomes using the result of the combination of a fundamental model and a model-based aggregation of polls. We propose a Bayesian hierarchical structure for the fundamental model that…
Here we focus on the description of the mechanisms behind the process of information aggregation and decision making, a basic step to understand emergent phenomena in society, such as trends, information spreading or the wisdom of crowds.…
Crowd predictions have demonstrated powerful performance in predicting future events. We aim to understand crowd prediction efficacy in ascertaining the veracity of human emotional expressions. We discover that collective discernment can…
The outcome of elections is strongly dependent on the districting choices, making thus possible (and frequent) the gerrymandering phenomenon, i.e.\ politicians suitably changing the shape of electoral districts in order to win the…
Independent voters play an increasingly decisive role in contemporary elections, yet their collective behavior remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how a minority of voters with greater flexibility in their political…
We explore conclusions a person draws from observing society when he allows for the possibility that individuals' outcomes are affected by group-level discrimination. Injecting a single non-classical assumption, that the agent is…
Computational propaganda deploys social or political bots to try to shape, steer and manipulate online public discussions and influence decisions. Collective behaviour of populations of social bots has not been yet widely studied, though…
We show how hidden interesting subelections can be discovered in ordinal elections. An interesting subelection consists of a reasonably large set of voters and a reasonably large set of candidates such that the former have a consistent…
Participatory budgeting, as a paradigm for democratic innovations, engages citizens in the distribution of a public budget to projects, which they propose and vote for implementation. So far, voting algorithms have been proposed and studied…