Related papers: Gerrymandering: A Briber's Perspective
We study positional voting rules when candidates and voters are embedded in a common metric space, and cardinal preferences are naturally given by distances in the metric space. In a positional voting rule, each candidate receives a score…
Fairness in multiwinner elections is studied in varying contexts. For instance, diversity of candidates and representation of voters are both separately termed as being fair. A common denominator to ensure fairness across all such contexts…
We consider the problem of a decision-maker searching for information on multiple alternatives when information is learned on all alternatives simultaneously. The decision-maker has a running cost of searching for information, and has to…
Challenge the champ tournaments are one of the simplest forms of competition, where a (initially selected) champ is repeatedly challenged by other players. If a player beats the champ, then that player is considered the new (current) champ.…
Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing biased electoral maps that manipulate the voter population to gain an advantage. The most recent time gerrymandering became an issue was 2019 when the U.S. Federal Supreme Court decided that the…
Bizarrely shaped voting districts are frequently lambasted as likely instances of gerrymandering. In order to systematically identify such instances, researchers have devised several tests for so-called geographic compactness (i.e., shape…
Judgment aggregation is a framework to aggregate individual opinions on multiple, logically connected issues into a collective outcome. These opinions are cast by judges, which can be for example referees, experts, advisors or jurors,…
The Coin Change problem, also known as the Change-Making problem, is a well-studied combinatorial optimization problem, which involves minimizing the number of coins needed to make a specific change amount using a given set of coin…
The orienteering problem is a well-studied and fundamental problem in transportation science. In the problem, we are given a graph with prizes on the nodes and lengths on the edges, together with a budget on the overall tour length. The…
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…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…
Graph burning is a discrete-time process that models the propagation of information in a network. Initially, we have an undirected graph of unburned vertices. At each time step, an unburned vertex is chosen to burn; additionally, unburned…
The design of good heuristics or approximation algorithms for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems often requires significant specialized knowledge and trial-and-error. Can we automate this challenging, tedious process, and learn the…
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…
Consider the following generalization of the classic binary search problem: A searcher is required to find a hidden target vertex $x$ in a graph $G$. To do so, they iteratively perform queries to an oracle, each about a chosen vertex $v$.…
The paper considers the problem of finding the number of dominant voters in two-level voting procedures. At the first stage, voting is conducted among local groups of voters, and at the second stage, the results are aggregated to form a…
We show NP-completeness for several planar variants of the monotone satisfiability problem with bounded variable appearances. With one exception the presented variants have an associated bipartite graph where the vertex degree is bounded by…
Several measures of partisan bias are reviewed for single member districts with two dominant parties. These include variants of the simple bias that considers only deviation of seats from 50% at statewide 50% vote. Also included are…
We consider a bandit problem over a graph where the rewards are not directly observed. Instead, the decision maker can compare two nodes and receive (stochastic) information pertaining to the difference in their value. The graph structure…
We consider the problem of a graph subjected to adversarial perturbations, such as those arising from cyber-attacks, where edges are covertly added or removed. The adversarial perturbations occur during the transmission of the graph between…