Related papers: Communication, Distortion, and Randomness in Metri…
Social decision schemes (SDSs) map the preferences of a group of voters over some set of $m$ alternatives to a probability distribution over the alternatives. A seminal characterization of strategyproof SDSs by Gibbard implies that there…
We consider the matching problem in the metric distortion framework. There are $n$ agents and $n$ items occupying points in a shared metric space, and the goal is to design a matching mechanism that outputs a low-cost matching between the…
In this paper, we propose a new averaging model for modeling the competitive influence of $K$ candidates among $n$ voters in an election process. For such an influence propagation model, we address the question of how many seeded voters a…
In light of the classic impossibility results of Arrow and Gibbard and Satterthwaite regarding voting with ordinal rules, there has been recent interest in characterizing how well common voting rules approximate the social optimum. In order…
We introduce a novel definition for a small set R of k points being "representative" of a larger set in a metric space. Given a set V (e.g., documents or voters) to represent, and a set C of possible representatives, our criterion requires…
In voting with ranked ballots, each agent submits a strict ranking of the form $a \succ b \succ c \succ d$ over the alternatives, and the voting rule decides on the winner based on these rankings. Although this ballot format has desirable…
Elections and opinion polls often have many candidates, with the aim to either rank the candidates or identify a small set of winners according to voters' preferences. In practice, voters do not provide a full ranking; instead, each voter…
By classic results in social choice theory, any reasonable preferential voting method sometimes gives individuals an incentive to report an insincere preference. The extent to which different voting methods are more or less resistant to…
Predicting the winner of an election is a favorite problem both for news media pundits and computational social choice theorists. Since it is often infeasible to elicit the preferences of all the voters in a typical prediction scenario, a…
Typical voting rules do not work well in settings with many candidates. If there are just several hundred candidates, then even a simple task such as choosing a top candidate becomes impractical. Motivated by the hope of developing group…
Low isometric distortion is often required for mesh parameterizations. A configuration of some vertices, where the distortion is concentrated, provides a way to mitigate isometric distortion, but determining the number and placement of…
The constrained voter model describes the dynamics of opinions in a population of individuals located on a connected graph. Each agent is characterized by her opinion, where the set of opinions is represented by a finite sequence of…
In a setting where $m$ items need to be partitioned among $n$ agents, we evaluate the performance of mechanisms that take as input each agent's \emph{ordinal preferences}, i.e., their ranking of the items from most- to least-preferred. The…
We initiate the study of distortion in stable matching. Concretely, we aim to design algorithms that have limited access to the agents' cardinal preferences and compute stable matchings of high quality with respect to some aggregate…
We study the problem of randomized Leader Election in synchronous distributed networks with indistinguishable nodes. We consider algorithms that work on networks of arbitrary topology in two settings, depending on whether the size of the…
We focus on the following natural question: is it possible to influence the outcome of a voting process through the strategic provision of information to voters who update their beliefs rationally? We investigate whether it is…
The median voter theorem has long been the default model of voter behavior and candidate choice. While contemporary work on the distribution of political opinion has emphasized polarization and an increasing gap between the "left" and the…
When people pursue rewards in stochastic environments, they often match their choice frequencies to the observed target frequencies, even when this policy is demonstrably sub-optimal. We used a ``hide and seek'' task to evaluate this…
Secrecy in communication systems is measured herein by the distortion that an adversary incurs. The transmitter and receiver share secret key, which they use to encrypt communication and ensure distortion at an adversary. A model is…
Recent works have studied the design of algorithms for selecting representative sortition panels. However, the most central question remains unaddressed: Do these panels reflect the entire population's opinion? We present a positive answer…