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We analyze the susceptibility of instant runoff voting (IRV) to a lesser-studied paradox known as a \emph{reinforcement paradox}, which occurs when candidate $X$ wins under IRV in two distinct elections but $X$ loses in the combined…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-04-20 David McCune , Jennifer Wilson

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-09-24 Matteo Castiglioni , Andrea Celli , Nicola Gatti

{\em Distortion} is a well-established notion for quantifying the loss of social welfare that may occur in voting. As voting rules take as input only ordinal information, they are essentially forced to neglect the exact values the agents…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Ioannis Caragiannis , Karl Fehrs

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Qishen Han , Grant Schoenebeck , Biaoshuai Tao , Lirong Xia

Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-04-12 Yiling Chen , Jessie Finocchiaro

Elections, the cornerstone of democratic societies, are usually regarded as unpredictable due to the complex interactions that shape them at different levels. In this work, we show that voter turnouts contain crucial information that can be…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-01-06 Ritam Pal , Aanjaneya Kumar , M. S. Santhanam

Algorithmic predictions are inherently uncertain: even models with similar aggregate accuracy can produce different predictions for the same individual, raising concerns that high-stakes decisions may become sensitive to arbitrary modeling…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Hansol Lee , AJ Alvero , René F. Kizilcec , Thorsten Joachims

In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting. Moreover, scenarios such as committee or board elections require voting rules that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent may vote…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Jaelle Scheuerman , Jason L. Harman , Nicholas Mattei , K. Brent Venable

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-04-21 Arnab Bhattacharyya , Palash Dey

Ranked-choice voting anomalies such as monotonicity paradoxes have been extensively studied through creating hypothetical examples and generating elections under various models of voter behavior. However, very few real-world examples of…

General Economics · Economics 2024-11-20 Adam Graham-Squire , David McCune

We consider synchronous iterative voting, where voters are given the opportunity to strategically choose their ballots depending on the outcome deduced from the previous collective choices.We propose two settings for synchronous iterative…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-02-11 Benoît Kloeckner

From the perspective of social choice theory, ranked-choice voting (RCV) is known to have many flaws. RCV can fail to elect a Condorcet winner and is susceptible to monotonicity paradoxes and the spoiler effect, for example. We use a…

General Economics · Economics 2023-03-07 Adam Graham-Squire , David McCune

A voting center is in charge of collecting and aggregating voter preferences. In an iterative process, the center sends comparison queries to voters, requesting them to submit their preference between two items. Voters might discuss the…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2019-09-24 Lihi Dery , Svetlana Obraztsova , Zinovi Rabinovich , Meir Kalech

Elections employ various voting systems to determine winners based on voters' preferences. However, many recent ranked-choice elections have forced voters to truncate their ballots by only ranking a subset of the candidates. This study…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Jonah Stein

We study the complexity of influencing elections through bribery: How computationally complex is it for an external actor to determine whether by a certain amount of bribing voters a specified candidate can be made the election's winner? We…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2008-08-23 Piotr Faliszewski , Edith Hemaspaandra , Lane A. Hemaspaandra

Motivated by the difficulty of specifying complete ordinal preferences over a large set of $m$ candidates, we study voting rules that are computable by querying voters about $t < m$ candidates. Generalizing prior works that focused on…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-30 Daniel Halpern , Safwan Hossain , Jamie Tucker-Foltz

Previous studies have shown that Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) is highly resistant to coalitional manipulation (CM), though the theoretical reasons for this remain unclear. To address this gap, we analyze the susceptibility to CM of three…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-17 François Durand

To aggregate rankings into a social ranking, one can use scoring systems such as Plurality, Veto, and Borda. We distinguish three types of methods: ranking by score, ranking by repeatedly choosing a winner that we delete and rank at the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Niclas Boehmer , Robert Bredereck , Dominik Peters

We study a modification of the so-called Parrondo's paradox where a large number of individuals choose the game they want to play by voting. We show that it can be better for the players to vote randomly than to vote according to their own…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-10-03 L. Dinis , J. M. R. Parrondo

Transportability provides a principled framework to address the problem of applying study results to new populations. Here, we consider the problem of selecting variables to include in transport estimators. We provide a brief overview of…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-12-11 Megha L. Mehrotra , M. Maria Glymour , Elvin Geng , Daniel Westreich , David V. Glidden