Related papers: Communication, Distortion, and Randomness in Metri…
Representative democracy in the United States relies on election systems that transmit votes into representatives in three key bodies: the two chambers of the federal legislature (House of Representatives and Senate) and the Electoral…
The one-dimensional long-range voter model, where an agent takes the opinion of another at distance $r$ with probability $\propto r^{-\alpha}$, is studied analytically. The model displays rich and diverse features as $\alpha$ is changed.…
Many hard computational social choice problems are known to become tractable when voters' preferences belong to a restricted domain, such as those of single-peaked or single-crossing preferences. However, to date, all algorithmic results of…
We propose a stochastic model of opinion exchange in networks. A finite set of agents is organized in a fixed network structure. There is a binary state of the world and each agent receives a private signal on the state. We model beliefs as…
We investigate a variation of the classical voter model in which the set of influencing agents depends on an individual's current opinion. The initial population consists of a random sample of equally sized sub-populations for each state,…
Motivated by recent work in computational social choice, we extend the metric distortion framework to clustering problems. Given a set of $n$ agents located in an underlying metric space, our goal is to partition them into $k$ clusters,…
We study the voter model dynamics in the presence of confidence and bias. We assume two types of voters. Unbiased voters whose confidence is indifferent to the state of the voter and biased voters whose confidence is biased towards a common…
In the impartial selection problem, a subset of agents up to a fixed size $k$ among a group of $n$ is to be chosen based on votes cast by the agents themselves. A selection mechanism is impartial if no agent can influence its own chance of…
We consider the problem of estimating the arithmetic average of a finite collection of real vectors stored in a distributed fashion across several compute nodes subject to a communication budget constraint. Our analysis does not rely on any…
The outcomes of democratic elections rest on individuals' decision-making that is driven by their varying preferences and beliefs. Individuals may prefer consensus to gridlock, or gridlock to consensus, and information may be fractured via…
In the $k$-committee election problem, we wish to aggregate the preferences of $n$ agents over a set of alternatives and select a committee of $k$ alternatives that minimizes the cost incurred by the agents. While we typically assume that…
A variety of problems in distributed control involve a networked system of autonomous agents cooperating to carry out some complex task in a decentralized fashion, e.g., orienting a flock of drones, or aggregating data from a network of…
Condorcet's paradox is a fundamental result in social choice theory which states that there exist elections in which, no matter which candidate wins, a majority of voters prefer a different candidate. In fact, even if we can select any $k$…
We consider a modification of the voter model in which a set of interacting elements (agents) can be in either of two equivalent states (A or B) or in a third additional mixed AB state. The model is motivated by studies of language…
In order to mitigate the high communication cost in distributed and federated learning, various vector compression schemes, such as quantization, sparsification and dithering, have become very popular. In designing a compression method, one…
We show that randomization can lead to significant improvements for a few fundamental problems in distributed tracking. Our basis is the {\em count-tracking} problem, where there are $k$ players, each holding a counter $n_i$ that gets…
In multiwinner approval elections with many candidates, voters may struggle to determine their preferences over the entire slate of candidates. It is therefore of interest to explore which (if any) fairness guarantees can be provided under…
Classical voting rules assume that ballots are complete preference orders over candidates. However, when the number of candidates is large enough, it is too costly to ask the voters to rank all candidates. We suggest to fix a rank k, to ask…
We study the distortion of one-sided and two-sided matching problems on the line. In the one-sided case, $n$ agents need to be matched to $n$ items, and each agent's cost in a matching is their distance from the item they were matched to.…
In this paper we consider a network of processors aiming at cooperatively solving linear programming problems subject to uncertainty. Each node only knows a common cost function and its local uncertain constraint set. We propose a…