Related papers: Electoral Accountability and Selection with Person…
In the United States electoral system, a candidate is elected indirectly by winning a majority of electoral votes cast by individual states, the election usually being decided by the votes cast by a small number of "swing states" where the…
How do we learn from biased data? Historical datasets often reflect historical prejudices; sensitive or protected attributes may affect the observed treatments and outcomes. Classification algorithms tasked with predicting outcomes…
We investigate mean-field dynamics of a nonlinear opinion formation model with congregator and contrarian agents. Each agent assumes one of the two possible states. Congregators imitate the state of other agents with a rate that increases…
A recently proposed model of social interaction in voting is investigated by simplifying it down into a version that is more analytically tractable and which allows a mathematical analysis to be performed. This analysis clarifies the…
We study a model for social influence in which the agents' opinion is a continuous variable [G. Weisbuch et al., Complexity \textbf{7}, 2, 55 (2002)]. The convergent opinion adjustment process takes place as a result of random binary…
Randomness in scientific estimation is generally assumed to arise from unmeasured or uncontrolled factors. However, when combining subjective probability estimates, heterogeneity stemming from people's cognitive or information diversity is…
When learning from others, people tend to focus their attention on those with similar views. This is often attributed to flawed reasoning, and thought to slow learning and polarize beliefs. However, we show that echo chambers are a rational…
This paper initiates the study of the testable implications of choice data in settings where agents have privacy preferences. We adapt the standard conceptualization of consumer choice theory to a situation where the consumer is aware of,…
How does the politician's reputation concern affect information provision when the information is endogenously provided by a biased lobbyist? I develop a model to study this problem and show that the answer depends on the transparency…
Much research in electoral control -- one of the most studied form of electoral attacks, in which an entity running an election alters the structure of that election to yield a preferred outcome -- has focused on giving decision complexity…
Predicting the winner of an election is of importance to multiple stakeholders. To formulate the problem, we consider an independent sequence of categorical data with a finite number of possible outcomes in each. The data is assumed to be…
Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…
In an election, we are given a set of voters, each having a preference list over a set of candidates, that are distributed on a social network. We consider a scenario where voters may change their preference lists as a consequence of the…
We study the effect of time-fluctuating social influences on the formation of polarization and consensus in a three-party community consisting of two types of voters ("leftists" and "rightists") holding extreme opinions, and moderate agents…
Policy learning can be used to extract individualized treatment regimes from observational data in healthcare, civics, e-commerce, and beyond. One big hurdle to policy learning is a commonplace lack of overlap in the data for different…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. The definition is flexible about the location or boundaries of the center. Using US survey data, the paper shows how this…
A multi-level model of opinion formation is presented which takes into account that attitudes on different issues are usually not independent. In the model, agents exchange beliefs regarding a series of facts. A cognitive structure of…
In online platforms, recommender systems are responsible for directing users to relevant contents. In order to enhance the users' engagement, recommender systems adapt their output to the reactions of the users, who are in turn affected by…
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…
Estimating the causal effect of a treatment or health policy with observational data can be challenging due to an imbalance of and a lack of overlap between treated and control covariate distributions. In the presence of limited overlap,…