Related papers: When Votes Change and Committees Should (Not)
We consider a committee voting on whether to adopt a reform under a quota rule, where members differ in how much they value the reform some supporting it, others opposing it. We examine how members can influence each other's votes through…
Neutral models aspire to explain biodiversity patterns in ecosystems where species difference can be neglected, as it might occur at a specific trophic level, and perfect symmetry is assumed between species. Voter-like models capture the…
Previous work on voter control, which refers to situations where a chair seeks to change the outcome of an election by deleting, adding, or partitioning voters, takes for granted that the chair knows all the voters' preferences and that all…
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…
The stability of a leadership against a growing internal opposition is studied in bottom-up hierarchical organizations. Using a very simple model with bottom-up majority rule voting, the dynamics of power distribution at the various…
We introduce a variant of the voter model in which agents may have different degrees of confidence on their opinions. Those with low confidence are normal voters whose state can change upon a single contact with a different neighboring…
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…
We consider the problem of electing a committee of $k$ candidates, subject to some constraints as to what this committee is supposed to look like. In our framework, the candidates are given labels as an abstraction of a politician's…
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…
We study the behavior of Range Voting and Normalized Range Voting with respect to electoral control. Electoral control encompasses attempts from an election chair to alter the structure of an election in order to change the outcome. We show…
We study the complexity of the destructive bribery problem---an external agent tries to prevent a disliked candidate from winning by bribery actions---in voting over combinatorial domains, where the set of candidates is the Cartesian…
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…
We consider the dynamics of the voter model and of the monomer-monomer catalytic process in the presence of many ``competing'' inhomogeneities and show, through exact calculations and numerical simulations, that their presence results in a…
The influence of contrarians on the noisy voter model is studied at the mean-field level. The noisy voter model is a variant of the voter model where agents can adopt two opinions, optimistic or pessimistic, and can change them by means of…
Justified representation (JR) is a standard notion of representation in multiwinner approval voting. Not only does a JR committee always exist, but previous work has also shown through experiments that the JR condition can typically be…
We introduce two-crossing elections as a generalization of single-crossing elections, showing a number of new results. First, we show that two-crossing elections can be recognized in polynomial time, by reduction to the well-studied…
The efficient computation of large matchings with desirable guarantees is a crucial objective in market design. However, even in simple two-sided matching markets with weak ordinal preferences, finding a maximum-size stable matching is…
A population of voters must elect representatives among themselves to decide on a sequence of possibly unforeseen binary issues. Voters care only about the final decision, not the elected representatives. The disutility of a voter is…
Direct democracy is a special case of an ensemble of classifiers, where every person (classifier) votes on every issue. This fails when the average voter competence (classifier accuracy) falls below 50%, which can happen in noisy settings…
The presence of phenomena analogous to phase transition in Statistical Mechanics, has been suggested in the evolution of a polygenic trait under stabilizing selection, mutation and genetic drift. By using numerical simulations of a model…