Related papers: Asymmetric Partisan Voter Turnout Games
Spatial voting models of legislators' preferences are used in political science to test theories about their voting behavior. These models posit that legislators' ideologies as well as the ideologies reflected in votes for and against a…
Randomized mechanisms can have good normative properties compared to their deterministic counterparts. However, randomized mechanisms are problematic in several ways such as in their verifiability. We propose here to derandomize such…
We examine the effects of introducing a political outsider to the nomination process leading to an election. To this end, we develop a sequential game where politicians -- insiders and outsiders -- make a platform offer to a party, and…
We consider a setting with agents that have preferences over alternatives and are partitioned into disjoint districts. The goal is to choose one alternative as the winner using a mechanism which first decides a representative alternative…
We consider the problem of manipulation of elections using positional voting rules under Impartial Culture voter behaviour. We consider both the logical possibility of coalitional manipulation, and the number of voters that must be…
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…
Consider the multicolored urn model where, after every draw, balls of the different colors are added to the urn in a proportion determined by a given stochastic replacement matrix. We consider some special replacement matrices which are not…
We consider the notions of agreement, diversity, and polarization in ordinal elections (that is, in elections where voters rank the candidates). While (computational) social choice offers good measures of agreement between the voters, such…
We show how hidden interesting subelections can be discovered in ordinal elections. An interesting subelection consists of a reasonably large set of voters and a reasonably large set of candidates such that the former have a consistent…
Idiosyncratic tendency to choose one alternative over others in the absence of an identified reason, is a common observation in two-alternative forced-choice experiments. It is tempting to account for it as resulting from the (unknown)…
In this paper, I characterize minimal stable voting rules and minimal self-stable constitutions (i.e., pairs of voting rules) for societies in which only power matters. To do so, I first let players' preference profiles over voting rules…
In this paper, I introduce a novel stability axiom for stochastic voting rules, called self-equivalence, by which a society considering whether to replace its voting rule using itself will choose not to do so. I then show that under the…
We study proportional representation in the temporal voting model, where collective decisions are made repeatedly over time over a fixed horizon. Prior work has extensively investigated how proportional representation axioms from…
We discuss voting scenarios in which the set of voters (agents) and the set of alternatives are the same; that is, voters select a single representative from among themselves. Such a scenario happens, for instance, when a committee selects…
A contrarian is someone who deliberately decides to oppoe the prevailing choice of others. The Galam model of two state opinion dynamicsincorporates agent updates by a single step random grouping in which all participants adopt the opinion…
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…
Inspired by the spread of discontent as in the 2016 presidential election, we consider a voter model in which 0's are ordinary voters and 1's are zealots. Thinking of a social network, but desiring the simplicity of an infinite object that…
We provide elementary proofs of several results concerning the possible outcomes arising from a fixed profile within the class of positional voting systems. Our arguments enable a simple and explicit construction of paradoxical profiles,…
We compare two versions of the nonlinear $q$-voter model: the original one, with annealed randomness, and the modified one, with quenched randomness. In the original model, each voter changes its opinion with a certain probability…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic paradigm whereby voters decide on a set of projects to fund with a limited budget. We consider PB in a setting where voters report ordinal preferences over projects and have (possibly) asymmetric…