Related papers: How Likely Are Large Elections Tied?
Randomisation and time-sharing are some of the oldest methods to achieve fairness. I make a case that applying these approaches to social choice settings constitutes a powerful paradigm that deserves an extensive and thorough examination. I…
In repeated-game applications where both the collusive and non-collusive outcomes can be supported as equilibria, researchers must resolve underlying selection questions if theory will be used to understand counterfactual policies. One…
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…
In distortion-based analysis of social choice rules over metric spaces, one assumes that all voters and candidates are jointly embedded in a common metric space. Voters rank candidates by non-decreasing distance. The mechanism, receiving…
In this paper we develop a novel approach to relaxing Arrow's axioms for voting rules, addressing a long-standing critique in social choice theory. Classical axioms (often styled as fairness axioms or fairness criteria) are assessed in a…
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…
The related concepts of partisan belief systems, issue alignment, and partisan sorting are central to our understanding of politics. These phenomena have been studied using measures of alignment between pairs of topics, or how much…
Referring to a standard context of voting theory, and to the classic notion of voting situation, here we show that it is possible to observe any arbitrary set of elections' outcomes, no matter how paradoxical it may appear. On this purpose…
Interleaving is an online evaluation approach for information retrieval systems that compares the effectiveness of ranking functions in interpreting the users' implicit feedback. Previous work such as Hofmann et al (2011) has evaluated the…
Our societies are heterogeneous in many dimensions such as census, education, religion, ethnic and cultural composition. The links between individuals - e.g. by friendship, marriage or collaboration - are not evenly distributed, but rather…
The maximal information coefficient (MIC) is a tool for finding the strongest pairwise relationships in a data set with many variables (Reshef et al., 2011). MIC is useful because it gives similar scores to equally noisy relationships of…
An electoral spoiler is usually defined as a losing candidate whose removal would affect the outcome by changing the winner. So far, spoiler effects have been analyzed primarily for single-winner electoral systems. We consider this subject…
The Condorcet criterion (CC) is a classical and well-accepted criterion for voting. Unfortunately, it is incompatible with many other desiderata including participation (Par), half-way monotonicity (HM), Maskin monotonicity (MM), and…
Consider an election where the set of candidates is partitioned into parties, and each party must choose exactly one candidate to nominate for the election held over all nominees. The Necessary President problem asks whether a candidate, if…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
Lifted inference algorithms exploit symmetries in probabilistic models to speed up inference. They show impressive performance when calculating unconditional probabilities in relational models, but often resort to non-lifted inference when…
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…
Distortion-based analysis has established itself as a fruitful framework for comparing voting mechanisms. m voters and n candidates are jointly embedded in an (unknown) metric space, and the voters submit rankings of candidates by…
Most of the computational study of election problems has assumed that each voter's preferences are, or should be extended to, a total order. However in practice voters may have preferences with ties. We study the complexity of manipulative…
Politics around the world exhibits increasing polarization, demonstrated in part by rigid voting configurations in institutions like legislatures or courts. A crux of polarization is separation along a unidimensional ideological axis, but…