Related papers: Electoral Accountability and Selection with Person…

We present a model of interacting multiple choices of opinions. At each step of the process, a listener is persuaded by his/her neighbour, the lobbyist, to modify his/her opinion on two different choices of event. Whether or not the…

We use a controlled experiment to study how information acquisition impacts candidate evaluations. We provide evaluators with group-level information on performance and the opportunity to acquire additional, individual-level performance…

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…

Practitioners often use data from a randomized controlled trial to learn a treatment assignment policy that can be deployed on a target population. A recurring concern in doing so is that, even if the randomized trial was well-executed…

Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…

The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As a…

We experimentally study how redistribution choices are affected by positive and negative information regarding the behaviour of a previous participant in a dictator game with a taking option. We use the strategy method to identify…

Often times, a candidate's attractiveness is directly associated with his clear ideologies and opinions on various policies and social issues. Using the ideas of stochastic differential equations and Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process, we develop a…

In multiagent settings where the agents have different preferences, preference aggregation is a central issue. Voting is a general method for preference aggregation, but seminal results have shown that all general voting protocols are…

Prediction polling is an increasingly popular form of crowdsourcing in which multiple participants estimate the probability or magnitude of some future event. These estimates are then aggregated into a single forecast. Historically,…

We introduce a socially motivated extension of the voter model in which individual voters are also influenced by two opposing, fixed-opinion news sources. These sources forestall consensus and instead drive the population to a politically…

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…

This paper proposes a novel approach for constructing effective personalized policies when the observed data lacks counter-factual information, is biased and possesses many features. The approach is applicable in a wide variety of settings…

Information availability affects people's behavior and perception of the world. Notably, people rely on search engines to satisfy their need for information. Search engines deliver results relevant to user requests usually without being or…

Large-scale social networks are thought to contribute to polarization by amplifying people's biases. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to identify the mechanisms responsible and to evaluate mitigation…

We analyze the accuracy of collective decision-making in socially connected populations, where agents update binary choices through local interactions on a network. Each agent receives a private signal that is biased -- even marginally --…

A social system is susceptible to perturbation when its collective properties depend sensitively on a few pivotal components. Using the information geometry of minimal models from statistical physics, we develop an approach to identify…

Economic hardships significantly affect public perception and voting intentions in general elections. The primary focus of my study is to capture the degree of influence that individual economic hardships have on their voting. I utilize the…

We consider the problem of assessing whether, in an individual case, there is a causal relationship between an observed exposure and a response variable. When data are available on similar individuals we may be able to estimate prospective…

The form of political polarization where citizens develop strongly negative attitudes towards out-party policies and members has become increasingly prominent across many democracies. Economic hardship and social inequality, as well as…