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Recent political campaigns have demonstrated how technologies are used to boost election outcomes by microtargeting voters. We propose and analyze a framework which analyzes how political activists use technologies to target voters. Voters…
Behavior of condensed matter systems deviating from the standard equilibrium conditions is discussed. Statistical properties of coupled dynamic-stochastic systems are studied within a combination of the maximum information principle and the…
There are many factors that can influence the outcome of an election. We here identify two dominant effects that can affect the votes obtained by a candidate, namely, the Majority Effect and the Media Effect. We mimic these two effects in a…
We analyze optimal strategies for the allocation of a finite budget that can be invested in different advertising channels over time with the objective of influencing social opinions in a network of individuals. In our analysis, we consider…
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…
We investigate how individuals form expectations about population behavior using statistical inference based on observations of their social relations. Misperceptions about others' connectedness and behavior arise from sampling bias…
We present quantitative relations between work and information that are valid both for finite sized and internally correlated systems as well in the thermodynamical limit. We suggest work extraction should be viewed as a game where the…
A well-studied randomized election algorithm proceeds as follows: In each round the remaining candidates each toss a coin and leave the competition if they obtain heads. Of interest is the number of rounds required and the number of…
Using results from neurobiology on perceptual decision making and value-based decision making, the problem of decision making between lotteries is reformulated in an abstract space where uncertain prospects are mapped to corresponding…
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…
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…
Understanding the nature of strategic voting is the holy grail of social choice theory, where game-theory, social science and recently computational approaches are all applied in order to model the incentives and behavior of voters. In a…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process for allocating funds to projects based on the votes of members of the community. Different rules have been used to aggregate participants' votes. Past research has studied the trade-off…
In approval-based multiwinner voting, voters express approval preferences over a set of candidates, and the goal is to return a winning committee. This model captures a broad range of subset selection problems under preferences. Prior work…
The ability to measure the satisfaction of (groups of) voters is a crucial prerequisite for formulating proportionality axioms in approval-based participatory budgeting elections. Two common - but very different - ways to measure the…
I derive the probability that a vote cast in an Instant Runoff Voting election will change the election winner. I phrase that probability in terms of the candidates' expected vote totals, and then I estimate its magnitude for different…
We introduce a general approach based on \emph{selective verification} and obtain approximate mechanisms without money for maximizing the social welfare in the general domain of utilitarian voting. Having a good allocation in mind, a…
Proportional representation plays a crucial role in electoral systems. In ordinal elections, where voters rank candidates based on their preferences, the Single Transferable Vote (STV) is the most widely used proportional voting method. STV…
We consider two-tier voting system and try to determine optimal weights for a fair representation in such systems. A prominent example of such a voting system is the Council of Ministers of the European Union. Under the assumption of…
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,…