Related papers: Predicting Strategic Voting Behavior with Poll Inf…
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…
Dispersal is often used by living beings to gather information from conspecifics, integrating it with personal experience to guide decision-making. This mechanism has only recently been studied experimentally, facilitated by advancements in…
Information theory has been very successful in obtaining performance limits for various problems such as communication, compression and hypothesis testing. Likewise, stochastic control theory provides a characterization of optimal policies…
Economists often estimate economic models on data and use the point estimates as a stand-in for the truth when studying the model's implications for optimal decision-making. This practice ignores model ambiguity, exposes the decision…
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…
In this work, we focus on strategies to influence the opinion dynamics of a well-connected society. We propose a generalization of the popular voter model. This variant of the voter model can capture a wide range of individuals including…
Online social media are key platforms for the public to discuss political issues. As a result, researchers have used data from these platforms to analyze public opinions and forecast election results. Recent studies reveal the existence of…
Voting systems typically treat all voters equally. We argue that perhaps they should not: Voters who have supported good choices in the past should be given higher weight than voters who have supported bad ones. To develop a formal…
We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…
We present a new algorithm for probabilistic planning with no observability. Our algorithm, called Probabilistic-FF, extends the heuristic forward-search machinery of Conformant-FF to problems with probabilistic uncertainty about both the…
We analyse strategic, complete information, sequential voting with ordinal preferences over the alternatives. We consider several voting mechanisms: plurality voting and approval voting with deterministic or uniform tie-breaking rules. We…
We consider a two-round election model involving $m$ voters and $n$ candidates. Each voter is endowed with a strict preference list ranking the candidates. In the first round, the candidates are partitioned into two subsets, $A$ and $B$,…
In this paper we study the impact of news media and public surveys on the electoral campaigns for political competitions. We present an agent-based model that addresses the effective influence of surveys in orienting the opinions of voters…
We study a crowdsourcing problem where the platform aims to incentivize distributed workers to provide high quality and truthful solutions without the ability to verify the solutions. While most prior work assumes that the platform and…
How do incentive levels affect strategic behaviour? We address this with an experiment that separately identifies own- and opponent-incentive effects in two dominance-solvable games that differ in strategic complexity. Higher own incentives…
By classic results in social choice theory, any reasonable preferential voting method sometimes gives individuals an incentive to report an insincere preference. The extent to which different voting methods are more or less resistant to…
With ever-increasing available data, predicting individuals' preferences and helping them locate the most relevant information has become a pressing need. Understanding and predicting preferences is also important from a fundamental point…
Classical results in voting theory show that strategic manipulation by voters is inevitable if a voting rule simultaneously satisfy certain desirable properties. Motivated by this, we study the relevant question of how often a voting rule…
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…
To better understand discriminations and the effect of affirmative actions in selection problems (e.g., college admission or hiring), a recent line of research proposed a model based on differential variance. This model assumes that the…