Related papers: Electing the Executive Branch
We analyze the optimal size of a congress in a representative democracy. We take an epistemic view where voters decide on a binary issue with one ground truth outcome, and each voter votes correctly according to their competence levels in…
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…
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…
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…
Peer reviews, evaluations, and selections are a fundamental aspect of modern science. Funding bodies the world over employ experts to review and select the best proposals from those submitted for funding. The problem of peer selection,…
Multi-winner voting is the process of selecting a fixed-size set of representative candidates based on voters' preferences. It occurs in applications ranging from politics (parliamentary elections) to the design of modern computer…
We examine the following voting situation. A committee of $k$ people is to be formed from a pool of n candidates. The voters selecting the committee will submit a list of $j$ candidates that they would prefer to be on the committee. We…
Social choice theory is the study of preference aggregation across a population, used both in mechanism design for human agents and in the democratic alignment of language models. In this study, we propose the representative social choice…
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…
We study the problem of fair sequential decision making given voter preferences. In each round, a decision rule must choose a decision from a set of alternatives where each voter reports which of these alternatives they approve. Instead of…
Classical power index analysis considers the individual's ability to influence the aggregated group decision by changing its own vote, where all decisions and votes are assumed to be binary. In many practical applications we have more…
Population protocols are a model of distributed computation intended for the study of networks of independent computing agents with dynamic communication structure. Each agent has a finite number of states, and communication opportunities…
Voting methods are instrumental design elements of democracies. Citizens use them to express and aggregate their preferences to reach a collective decision. However, voting outcomes can be as sensitive to voting rules as they are to…
In certain parliamentary democracies, there are two major parties that move in and out of power every few elections, and a third minority party that essentially never governs. We present a simple model to account for this phenomenon, in…
Approval voting is a common method of preference aggregation where voters vote by ``approving'' of a subset of candidates and the winner(s) are those who are approved of by the largest number of voters. In approval voting, the degree to…
Online communities provide ample opportunities for user self-expression but generally lack the means for average users to exercise direct control over community policies. This paper sets out to identify a set of strategies and techniques…
Public confidence in democratic institutions has declined across many OECD countries over recent decades, while political participation and policy influence remain unevenly distributed across socioeconomic groups. Concurrently, democratic…
Traditionally, the problem of apportioning the seats of a legislative body has been viewed as a one-shot process with no dynamic considerations. While this approach is reasonable for some settings, dynamic aspects play an important role in…
Online discussion platforms are a vital part of the public discourse in a deliberative democracy. However, how to interpret the outcomes of the discussions on these platforms is often unclear. In this paper, we propose a novel and…
In the computational social choice literature, there has been great interest in understanding how computational complexity can act as a barrier against manipulation of elections. Much of this literature, however, makes the assumption that…