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In the absence of historical data for use as forecasting inputs, decision makers often ask a panel of judges to predict the outcome of interest, leveraging the wisdom of the crowd (Surowiecki 2005). Even if the crowd is large and skilled,…
In this paper we present a technique to couple non-traditional data with statistics based on survey data, in order to partially correct for the bias produced by non-random sample selections. All major social media platforms represent huge…
We present a new method for probabilistic elicitation of expert knowledge using binary responses of human experts assessing simulated data from a statistical model, where the parameters are subject to uncertainty. The binary responses…
Today, our more-than-ever digital lives leave significant footprints in cyberspace. Large scale collections of these socially generated footprints, often known as big data, could help us to re-investigate different aspects of our social…
We design a recursive measure of voting power based on partial as well as full voting efficacy. Classical measures, by contrast, incorporate solely full efficacy. We motivate our design by representing voting games using a division lattice…
We consider a type of pull voting suitable for discrete numeric opinions which can be compared on a linear scale, for example, 1 ('disagree strongly'), 2 ('disagree'), $\ldots,$ 5 ('agree strongly'). On observing the opinion of a random…
Population protocols are a relatively novel computational model in which very resource-limited anonymous agents interact in pairs with the goal of computing predicates. We consider the probabilistic version of this model, which naturally…
Typical voting rules do not work well in settings with many candidates. If there are just several hundred candidates, then even a simple task such as choosing a top candidate becomes impractical. Motivated by the hope of developing group…
We study a two-alternative voting game where voters' preferences depend on an unobservable world state and each voter receives a private signal correlated to the true world state. We consider the collective decision when voters can…
Crowd predictions have demonstrated powerful performance in predicting future events. We aim to understand crowd prediction efficacy in ascertaining the veracity of human emotional expressions. We discover that collective discernment can…
It is very common to observe crowds of individuals solving similar problems with similar information in a largely independent manner. We argue here that crowds can become "smarter," i.e., more efficient and robust, by partially following…
The margin of victory of an election is a useful measure to capture the robustness of an election outcome. It also plays a crucial role in determining the sample size of various algorithms in post election audit, polling etc. In this work,…
We consider the predictive problem of supervised ranking, where the task is to rank sets of candidate items returned in response to queries. Although there exist statistical procedures that come with guarantees of consistency in this…
We consider the \emph{exact plurality consensus} problem for \emph{population protocols}. Here, $n$ anonymous agents start each with one of $k$ opinions. Their goal is to agree on the initially most frequent opinion (the \emph{plurality…
In-degree, PageRank, number of visits and other measures of Web page popularity significantly influence the ranking of search results by modern search engines. The assumption is that popularity is closely correlated with quality, a more…
Nowadays, crowd sensing becomes increasingly more popular due to the ubiquitous usage of mobile devices. However, the quality of such human-generated sensory data varies significantly among different users. To better utilize sensory data,…
Recommendation algorithms are susceptible to popularity bias: a tendency to recommend popular items even when they fail to meet user needs. A related issue is that the recommendation quality can vary by demographic groups. Marginalized…
Despite extensive research, the mechanisms through which online platforms shape extremism and polarization remain poorly understood. We identify and test a mechanism, grounded in empirical evidence, that explains how ranking algorithms can…
The many metrics employed for the evaluation of search engine results have not themselves been conclusively evaluated. We propose a new measure for a metric's ability to identify user preference of result lists. Using this measure, we…
One goal of online social recommendation systems is to harness the wisdom of crowds in order to identify high quality content. Yet the sequential voting mechanisms that are commonly used by these systems are at odds with existing…