Related papers: Surprise in Elections
We study the problem of election control through social influence when the manipulator is allowed to use the locations that she acquired on the network for sending \emph{both} positive and negative messages on \emph{multiple} candidates,…
Much research in electoral control -- one of the most studied form of electoral attacks, in which an entity running an election alters the structure of that election to yield a preferred outcome -- has focused on giving decision complexity…
How do humans respond to indirect social influence when making decisions? We analysed an experiment where subjects had to repeatedly guess the correct answer to factual questions, while having only aggregated information about the answers…
Social choice functions help aggregate individual preferences while differentially private mechanisms provide formal privacy guarantees to release answers of queries operating on sensitive data. However, preserving differential privacy…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
One of the most crucial issues in data mining is to model human behaviour in order to provide personalisation, adaptation and recommendation. This usually involves implicit or explicit knowledge, either by observing user interactions, or by…
Optimizing recommender systems based on user interaction data is mainly seen as a problem of dealing with selection bias, where most existing work assumes that interactions from different users are independent. However, it has been shown…
We use causal inference to study how designing ballots with and without party designations impacts electoral outcomes when partisan voters rely on party-order cues to infer candidate affiliation in races without designations. If the party…
Conjoint experiments randomize multidimensional profiles, offering a powerful design for recovering structural preference parameters -- including marginal rates of substitution, willingness to pay, and the distribution of preferences across…
Ranking algorithms play a crucial role in online platforms ranging from search engines to recommender systems. In this paper, we identify a surprising consequence of popularity-based rankings: the fewer the items reporting a given signal,…
While manipulative attacks on elections have been well-studied, only recently has attention turned to attacks that account for geographic information, which are extremely common in the real world. The most well known in the media is…
Most social choice rules assume access to full rankings, while current alignment practice -- despite aiming for diversity -- typically treats voters as anonymous and comparisons as independent, effectively extracting only about one bit per…
We propose a stochastic model of opinion exchange in networks. A finite set of agents is organized in a fixed network structure. There is a binary state of the world and each agent receives a private signal on the state. We model beliefs as…
Statistical hypothesis testing serves as statistical evidence for scientific innovation. However, if the reported results are intentionally biased, hypothesis testing no longer controls the rate of false discovery. In particular, we study…
Generating models from large data sets -- and determining which subsets of data to mine -- is becoming increasingly automated. However choosing what data to collect in the first place requires human intuition or experience, usually supplied…
The puzzling idea that the combination of independent estimates of the magnitude of a quantity results in a very accurate prediction, which is superior to any or, at least, to most of the individual estimates is known as the wisdom of…
In this paper, a new randomized response technique aimed at protecting respondents' privacy is proposed. It is designed for estimating the population total, or the population mean, of a quantitative characteristic. It provides a~high degree…
This work contributes to a foundational question in economic theory: how do individual-level cognitive biases interact with collective choice mechanisms? We study a setting where voters hold intrinsic preference rankings over a set of…
Human understanding of randomness and variation is shaped by a number of cognitive biases. Here we relate a lesser-known cognitive bias, the "outcome orientation", to medical questions and describe the harm that the outcome orientation can…
Social contexts -- such as families, schools, and neighborhoods -- shape life outcomes. The key question is not simply whether they matter, but rather for whom and under what conditions. Here, we argue that prediction gaps -- differences in…