Related papers: Utility Ghost: Gamified redistricting with partisa…
Gerrymandering, the deliberate manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is a persistent issue in U.S. redistricting cycles. This paper introduces and analyzes a new phenomenon, 'votemandering'- a strategic…
In multiplayer games with sequential decision-making, self-interested players form dynamic coalitions to achieve most-preferred temporal goals beyond their individual capabilities. We introduce a novel procedure to synthesize strategies…
Apportionment is the act of distributing the seats of a legislature among political parties (or states) in proportion to their vote shares (or populations). A famous impossibility by Balinski and Young (2001) shows that no apportionment…
This paper coins the notion of Joker games, a variant of concurrent games where the players are not strictly adversarial. Instead, Player 1 can get help from Player 2 by playing a Joker move. We formalize these games as cost games and…
We propose an abstract approach to coalition formation that focuses on simple merge and split rules transforming partitions of a group of players. We identify conditions under which every iteration of these rules yields a unique partition.…
Gist is a tool that (a) solves the qualitative analysis problem of turn-based probabilistic games with {\omega}-regular objectives; and (b) synthesizes reasonable environment assumptions for synthesis of unrealizable specifications. Our…
We study a distributed allocation process where, repeatedly in time, every player renegotiates past allocations with neighbors and allocates new revenues. The average allocations evolve according to a doubly (over time and space) averaging…
Using an ensemble of redistricting plans, we evaluate whether a given political districting faithfully represents the geo-political landscape. Redistricting plans are sampled by a Monte Carlo algorithm from a probability distribution that…
This paper presents a novel mechanism to endogenously determine the fair division of a state into electoral districts in a two-party setting. No geometric constraints are imposed on voter distributions or district shapes; instead, it is…
We consider three variants of a partisan combinatorial game between two players, Left and Right, played on an undirected simple graph. Left is able to delete vertices (and incident edges) while Right is able to delete edges. This natural…
The colloquial phrase "partisan bias" encompasses multiple distinct conceptions of bias, including partisan advantage, packing & cracking, and partisan symmetry. All are useful and have their place, and there are several proposed measures…
Many people believe that it is disadvantageous for members aligning with a minority party to cluster in cities, as this makes it easier for the majority party to gerrymander district boundaries to diminish the representation of the…
This preprint offers a detailed look, both qualitative and quantitative, at districting with respect to recent voting patterns in one state: Pennsylvania. We investigate how much the partisan playing field is tilted by political geography.…
The process of drawing electoral district boundaries is known as political redistricting. Within this context, gerrymandering is the practice of drawing these boundaries such that they unfairly favor a particular political party, often…
Generalized Geography is a combinatorial game played on a directed graph. Players take turns moving a token from vertex to vertex, deleting a vertex after moving the token away from it. A player unable to move loses. It is well known that…
Recently, an increasing number of researchers, especially in the realm of political redistricting, have proposed sampling-based techniques to generate a subset of plans from the vast space of districting plans. These techniques have been…
Congressional district lines in many U.S. states are drawn by partisan actors, raising concerns about gerrymandering. To separate the partisan effects of redistricting from the effects of other factors including geography and redistricting…
When auditing a redistricting plan, a persuasive method is to compare the plan with an ensemble of neutrally drawn redistricting plans. Ensembles are generated via algorithms that sample distributions on balanced graph partitions. To audit…
A natural partial ordering exists on the set of all weighted games and, more broadly, on all linear games. We describe several properties of the partially ordered sets formed by these games and utilize this perspective to enumerate proper…
Many democratic societies use district-based elections, where the region under consideration is geographically divided into districts and a representative is chosen for each district based on the preferences of the electors who reside…