Related papers: Reaching Consensus Under a Deadline

The theory of discrete-time online learning has been successfully applied in many problems that involve sequential decision-making under uncertainty. However, in many applications including contractual hiring in online freelancing platforms…

One of the basic tasks which is responded for head of each university department, is employing lecturers based on some default factors such as experience, evidences, qualifies and etc. In this respect, to help the heads, some automatic…

This paper studies prototypical strategies to sequentially aggregate independent decisions. We consider a collection of agents, each performing binary hypothesis testing and each obtaining a decision over time. We assume the agents are…

Quality assurance remains a key topic in human computation research. Prior work indicates that majority voting is effective for low difficulty tasks, but has limitations for harder tasks. This paper explores two methods of addressing this…

Electing a single committee of a small size is a classical and well-understood voting situation. Being interested in a sequence of committees, we introduce and study two time-dependent multistage models based on simple Plurality voting.…

In spite of efforts to increase participation, many online groups struggle to survive past the initial days, as members leave and activity atrophies. We argue that a main assumption of online group design -- that groups ask nothing of their…

Successfully attaining consensus in the absence of a centralized coordinator is a fundamental problem in distributed multi-agent systems. We analyze progress in the Synod consensus protocol -- which does not assume a unique leader -- under…

We study consensus processes on the complete graph of $n$ nodes. Initially, each node supports one from up to n opinions. Nodes randomly and in parallel sample the opinions of constant many nodes. Based on these samples, they use an update…

A core element in decision-making under uncertainty is the feedback on the quality of the performed actions. However, in many applications, such feedback is restricted. For example, in recommendation systems, repeatedly asking the user to…

For job scheduling systems, where jobs require some amount of processing and then leave the system, it is natural for each user to provide an estimate of their job's time requirement in order to aid the scheduler. However, if there is no…

In this paper, we study fairness in committee selection problems. We consider a general notion of fairness via stability: A committee is stable if no coalition of voters can deviate and choose a committee of proportional size, so that all…

The constrained consensus problem considered in this paper, denoted interval consensus, is characterized by the fact that each agent can impose a lower and upper bound on the achievable consensus value. Such constraints can be encoded in…

Most social choice rules assume access to full rankings, while current alignment practice -- despite aiming for diversity -- typically treats voters as anonymous and comparisons as independent, effectively extracting only about one bit per…

This paper addresses the robust consensus problem under switching topologies. Contrary to existing methods, the proposed approach provides decentralized protocols that achieve consensus for networked multi-agent systems in a predefined…

We consider the problem of committee selection from a fixed set of candidates where each candidate has multiple quantifiable attributes. To select the best possible committee, instead of voting for a candidate, a voter is allowed to approve…

The problem of scheduling with testing in the framework of explorable uncertainty models environments where some preliminary action can influence the duration of a task. In the model, each job has an unknown processing time that can be…

How do social animals make effective decisions in the absence of a leader? While coordination can improve accuracy, it also introduces delays as information propagates through the group. In changing environments, these delays can outweigh…

We study two-stage committee elections where voters have dynamic preferences over candidates; at each stage, a committee is chosen under a given voting rule. We are interested in identifying a winning committee for the second stage that…

We consider a combined problem of teaming and scheduling of multi-skilled employees that have to perform jobs with uncertain qualification requirements. We propose two modeling approaches that generate solutions that are robust to possible…

Voting algorithms have been widely used as consensus protocols in the realization of fault-tolerant systems. These algorithms are best suited for distributed systems of nodes with low computational power or heterogeneous networks, where…