Related papers: Proportional Participatory Budgeting with Projects…
We review probabilistic models known as majority dynamics (also known as threshold Voter Models) and discuss their possible applications for achieving consensus in cryptocurrency systems. In particular, we show that using this approach…
A key promise of democratic voting is that, by accounting for all constituents' preferences, it produces decisions that benefit the constituency overall. It is alarming, then, that all deterministic voting rules have unbounded distortion:…
Sortition is a political system in which decisions are made by panels of randomly selected citizens. The process for selecting a sortition panel is traditionally thought of as uniform sampling without replacement, which has strong fairness…
Agents often have individual goals which depend on a group's actions. If agents trust a forecast of collective action and adapt strategically, such prediction can influence outcomes non-trivially, resulting in a form of performative…
We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two alternatives at…
Several rules for social choice are examined from a unifying point of view that looks at them as procedures for revising a system of degrees of belief in accordance with certain specified logical constraints. Belief is here a social…
Population protocols are a model for distributed computing that is focused on simplicity and robustness. A system of $n$ identical agents (finite state machines) performs a global task like electing a unique leader or determining the…
In rank aggregation, the task is to aggregate multiple weighted input rankings into a single output ranking. While numerous methods, so-called social welfare functions (SWFs), have been suggested for this problem, all of the classical SWFs…
Citizens' assemblies are an increasingly influential form of deliberative democracy, where randomly selected people discuss policy questions. The legitimacy of these assemblies hinges on their representation of the broader population, but…
We introduce an end-to-end model of participatory budgeting grounded in social choice theory. This model accounts for both the first stage, in which participants propose projects to be shortlisted, and the second stage, in which they vote…
Most social choice rules assume access to full rankings, while current alignment practice -- despite aiming for diversity -- typically treats voters as anonymous and comparisons as independent, effectively extracting only about one bit per…
We focus on the strategyproofness of voting systems where voters must choose a number of options among several possibilities. These systems include those that are used for Participatory Budgeting, where we organize an election to determine…
Consider an undirected graph G, representing a social network, where each node is blue or red, corresponding to positive or negative opinion on a topic. In the voter model, in discrete time rounds, each node picks a neighbour uniformly at…
Platforms for online civic participation rely heavily on methods for condensing thousands of comments into a relevant handful, based on whether participants agree or disagree with them. These methods should guarantee fair representation of…
We study a mechanism design problem where a community of agents wishes to fund public projects via voluntary monetary contributions by the community members. This serves as a model for public expenditure without an exogenously available…
Comparing the differences in outcomes (that is, in "dependent variables") between two subpopulations is often most informative when comparing outcomes only for individuals from the subpopulations who are similar according to "independent…
Civic Crowdfunding (CC) uses the ``power of the crowd'' to garner contributions towards public projects. As these projects are non-excludable, agents may prefer to ``free-ride,'' resulting in the project not being funded. For single project…
The apportionment problem constitutes a fundamental problem in democratic societies: How to distribute a fixed number of seats among a set of states in proportion to the states' populations? This--seemingly simple--task has led to a rich…
A prediction market is a useful means of aggregating information about a future event. To function, the market needs a trusted entity who will verify the true outcome in the end. Motivated by the recent introduction of decentralized…
Apportionment is the task of assigning resources to entities with different entitlements in a fair manner, and specifically a manner that is as proportional as possible. The best-known application is the assignment of parliamentary seats to…