Related papers: Efficient democratic decisions via nondeterministi…

We design two mechanisms that ensure that the majority preferred option wins in all equilibria. The first one is a simultaneous game where agents choose other agents to cooperate with on top of the vote for an alternative, thus overcoming…

Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…

During deliberation processes, mediators and facilitators typically need to select a small and representative set of opinions later used to produce digestible reports for stakeholders. In online deliberation platforms, algorithmic selection…

In this paper, we consider lightweight decentralised algorithms for achieving consensus in distributed systems. Each member of a distributed group has a private value from a fixed set consisting of, say, two elements, and the goal is for…

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…

We consider an agent community wishing to decide on several binary issues by means of issue-by-issue majority voting. For each issue and each agent, one of the two options is better than the other. However, some of the agents may be…

The legitimacy of bottom-up democratic processes for the distribution of public funds by policy-makers is challenging and complex. Participatory budgeting is such a process, where voting outcomes may not always be fair or inclusive.…

Agents vote to choose a fair mixture of public outcomes; each agent likes or dislikes each outcome. We discuss three outstanding voting rules. The Conditional Utilitarian rule, a variant of the random dictator, is Strategyproof and…

We develop and apply epistemic tests to various decentralized governance methods as well as to study the impact of participation. These tests probe the ability to reach a correct outcome when there is one. We find that partial abstention is…

We generalize a binary majority-vote model on adaptive networks to a plurality-vote counterpart. When opinions are uniformly distributed in the population of voters in the initial state, it is found that having more available opinions in…

It is well known that no reasonable voting rule is strategyproof. Moreover, the common Plurality rule is particularly prone to strategic behavior of the voters and empirical studies show that people often vote strategically in practice.…

We present an alternative voting system that aims at bridging the gap between proportional representative systems and majoritarian, single winner election systems. The system lets people vote for multiple parties, but then assigns each…

The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…

Platforms for online civic participation rely heavily on methods for condensing thousands of comments into a relevant handful, based on whether participants agree or disagree with them. These methods should guarantee fair representation of…

We study the voting problem with two alternatives where voters' preferences depend on a not-directly-observable state variable. While equilibria in the one-round voting mechanisms lead to a good decision, they are usually hard to compute…

A key promise of democratic voting is that, by accounting for all constituents' preferences, it produces decisions that benefit the constituency overall. It is alarming, then, that all deterministic voting rules have unbounded distortion:…

We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interference by third parties. For example, suppose votes have been cast in an election between two candidates, and then each vote is randomly changed with a small…

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…

Strongly opinionated minorities can have a dramatic impact on the opinion dynamics of a large population. Two factions of inflexible minorities, polarised into two competing opinions, could lead the entire population to persistent…

In collective decision making, where a voting rule is used to take a collective decision among a group of agents, manipulation by one or more agents is usually considered negative behavior to be avoided, or at least to be made…