Related papers: Surprise in Elections
We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are…
We present novel methods for predicting the outcome of large elections. Our first algorithm uses a diffusion process to model the time uncertainty inherent in polls taken with substantial calendar time left to the election. Our second model…
Comparing the differences in outcomes (that is, in "dependent variables") between two subpopulations is often most informative when comparing outcomes only for individuals from the subpopulations who are similar according to "independent…
A population of voters must elect representatives among themselves to decide on a sequence of possibly unforeseen binary issues. Voters care only about the final decision, not the elected representatives. The disutility of a voter is…
The interest in the wisdom of crowds stems mainly from the possibility of combining independent forecasts from experts in the hope that many expert minds are better than a few. Hence the relevant subject of study nowadays is the Vox…
We introduce a socially motivated extension of the voter model in which individual voters are also influenced by two opposing, fixed-opinion news sources. These sources forestall consensus and instead drive the population to a politically…
We study how office-seeking parties use direct democracy to shape elections. A party with a strong electoral base can benefit from using a binding referendum to resolve issues that divide its core supporters. When referendums do not bind,…
We prove that a subtle but substantial bias exists in a common measure of the conditional dependence of present outcomes on streaks of past outcomes in sequential data. The magnitude of this streak selection bias generally decreases as the…
Most of the computational study of election problems has assumed that each voter's preferences are, or should be extended to, a total order. However in practice voters may have preferences with ties. We study the complexity of manipulative…
Randomness in scientific estimation is generally assumed to arise from unmeasured or uncontrolled factors. However, when combining subjective probability estimates, heterogeneity stemming from people's cognitive or information diversity is…
Facing an unknown situation, a person may not be able to firmly elicit his/her preferences over different alternatives, so he/she tends to express uncertain preferences. Given a community of different persons expressing their preferences…
We investigate the problem of computing the probability of winning in an election where voter attendance is uncertain. More precisely, we study the setting where, in addition to a total ordering of the candidates, each voter is associated…
The traditional axiomatic approach to voting is motivated by the problem of reconciling differences in subjective preferences. In contrast, a dominant line of work in the theory of voting over the past 15 years has considered a different…
We consider models for social choice where voters rank a set of choices (or alternatives) by deliberating in small groups of size at most $k$, and these outcomes are aggregated by a social choice rule to find the winning alternative. We…
Reasoning about unpredicted change consists in explaining observations by events; we propose here an approach for explaining time-stamped observations by surprises, which are simple events consisting in the change of the truth value of a…
A desire to understand the decision of the UK to leave the European Union, Brexit, in the referendum of June 2016 has continued to occupy academics, the media and politicians. Using topological data analysis ball mapper we extract…
Social behaviors are often contagious, spreading through a population as individuals imitate the decisions and choices of others. A variety of global phenomena, from innovation adoption to the emergence of social norms and political…
In this article we demonstrate how algorithmic probability theory is applied to situations that involve uncertainty. When people are unsure of their model of reality, then the outcome they observe will cause them to update their beliefs. We…
Behavioural economics provides labels for patterns in human economic behaviour. Probability weighting is one such label. It expresses a mismatch between probabilities used in a formal model of a decision (i.e. model parameters) and…
Prediction polling is an increasingly popular form of crowdsourcing in which multiple participants estimate the probability or magnitude of some future event. These estimates are then aggregated into a single forecast. Historically,…