Related papers: A Mathematical Model for Optimal Decisions in a Re…
Finding a representative cohort from a broad pool of candidates is a goal that arises in many contexts such as choosing governing committees and consumer panels. While there are many ways to define the degree to which a cohort represents a…
The idea of liquid democracy responds to a widely-felt desire to make democracy more "fluid" and continuously participatory. Its central premise is to enable users to employ networked technologies to control and delegate voting power, to…
Social dynamics determined by voting in a stochastic environment is analyzed for a society composed of two cohesive groups of similar size. Within the model of random walks determined by voting, explicit formulas are derived for the capital…
How should one combine noisy information from diverse sources to make an inference about an objective ground truth? This frequently recurring, normative question lies at the core of statistics, machine learning, policy-making, and everyday…
In the face of adverse motives, it is indispensable to achieve a consensus. Elections have been the canonical way by which modern democracy has operated since the 17th century. Nowadays, they regulate markets, provide an engine for modern…
We consider three algorithms for allocating parliamentary seats by proportional representation. The usual approach to describing such algorithms is to compute a quota of votes that each party uses to "acquire'' representatives. This kind of…
Proportional representation (PR) is a fundamental principle of many democracies world-wide which employ PR-based voting rules to elect their representatives. The normative properties of these voting rules however, are often only understood…
Traffic jams on roadways, echo chambers on social media, crowds of moving pedestrians, and opinion dynamics during elections are all complex social systems. These applications may seem disparate, but some of the questions that they motivate…
Participatory Budgeting (PB) is commonly studied from an axiomatic perspective, where the aim is to design procedurally fair and economically efficient rules for voters with full information regarding their preferences. In contrast, we take…
I study the optimal voting mechanism for a committee that must decide whether to enact or block a policy of unknown benefit. Information can come both from committee members who can acquire it at cost, and a strategic lobbyist who wishes…
The computational study of elections generally assumes that the preferences of the electorate come in as a list of votes. Depending on the context, it may be much more natural to represent the list succinctly, as the distinct votes of the…
A citizens' assembly is a group of people who are randomly selected to represent a larger population in a deliberation. While this approach has successfully strengthened democracy, it has certain limitations that suggest the need for…
We investigate opinion dynamics in a fully-connected system, consisting of $n$ identical and anonymous agents, where one of the opinions (which is called correct) represents a piece of information to disseminate. In more detail, one source…
When confronted with a host of issues, groups often save time and energy by compiling many issues into a single bundle when making decisions. This reduces the time and cost of group decision-making, but it also leads to suboptimal outcomes…
A key promise of democratic voting is that, by accounting for all constituents' preferences, it produces decisions that benefit the constituency overall. It is alarming, then, that all deterministic voting rules have unbounded distortion:…
Agents vote to choose a fair mixture of public outcomes; each agent likes or dislikes each outcome. We discuss three outstanding voting rules. The Conditional Utilitarian rule, a variant of the random dictator, is Strategyproof and…
A central feature of many deliberative processes, such as citizens' assemblies and deliberative polls, is the opportunity for participants to engage directly with experts. While participants are typically invited to propose questions for…
Iterative voting is a natural model of repeated strategic decision-making in social choice theory when agents have the opportunity to update their votes prior to finalizing the group decision. Prior work has analyzed the efficacy of…
In large scale collective decision making, social choice is a normative study of how one ought to design a protocol for reaching consensus. However, in instances where the underlying decision space is too large or complex for ordinal…
The mathematical study of voting, social choice theory, has traditionally only been applicable to choices among a few predetermined alternatives, but not to open-ended decisions such as collectively selecting a textual statement. We…