Related papers: Who Votes for Library Bonds? A Principal Component…
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…
We study three axioms in the model of constrained social choice under uncertainty where (i) agents have subjective expected utility preferences over acts and (ii) different states of nature have (possibly) different sets of available…
We study a family of opinion formation models in one dimension where the propensity for a voter to align with its local environment depends non-linearly on the fraction of disagreeing neighbors. Depending on this non-linearity in the voting…
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…
Composite indicators aggregate a set of variables using weights which are understood to reflect the variables' importance in the index. In this paper we propose to measure the importance of a given variable within existing composite…
We introduce the vacillating voter model in which each voter consults two neighbors to decide its state, and changes opinion if it disagrees with either neighbor. This irresolution leads to a global bias toward zero magnetization. In…
In the process of information gathering on the web, confirmation bias is known to exist, exemplified in phenomena such as echo chambers and filter bubbles. Our purpose is to reveal how people consume news and discuss these phenomena. In web…
College admissions in the United States is carried out by a human-centered method of evaluation known as holistic review, which typically involves reading original narrative essays submitted by each applicant. The legitimacy and fairness of…
Multiwinner voting rules are used to select a small representative subset of candidates or items from a larger set given the preferences of voters. However, if candidates have sensitive attributes such as gender or ethnicity (when selecting…
We consider the following problem in which a given number of items has to be chosen from a predefined set. Each item is described by a vector of attributes and for each attribute there is a desired distribution that the selected set should…
How well do demographics explain party identification? Demographics are related to party identification in political polls, news articles, and academic publications. Yet, there is a diversity of party identification even within demographic…
Some distinguished types of voters, as vetoers, passers or nulls, as well as some others, play a significant role in voting systems because they are either the most powerful or the least powerful voters in the game independently of the…
Psychological studies have shown that personality traits are associated with book preferences. However, past findings are based on questionnaires focusing on conventional book genres and are unrepresentative of niche content. For a more…
In approval-based committee (ABC) voting, the goal is to choose a subset of predefined size of the candidates based on the voters' approval preferences over the candidates. While this problem has attracted significant attention in recent…
It is increasingly recognized that participation bias can pose problems for genetic studies. Recently, to overcome the challenge that genetic information of non-participants is unavailable, it is shown that by comparing the IBD (identity by…
In elections, the vote shares or turnout rates show a strong spatial correlation. The logarithmic decay with distance suggests that a 2D noisy diffusive equation describes the system. Based on the study of U.S. presidential elections data,…
This paper empirically analyzes how individual characteristics are associated with risk aversion, loss aversion, time discounting, and present bias. To this end, we conduct a large-scale demographically representative survey across eight…
Voting systems typically treat all voters equally. We argue that perhaps they should not: Voters who have supported good choices in the past should be given higher weight than voters who have supported bad ones. To develop a formal…
Experiments suggest that people fail to take into account interdependencies between their choices -- they do not broadly bracket. Researchers often instead assume that people narrowly bracket, but existing designs do not test it. We design…
In many circumstances there is a trade off between the number of voters and the time they can be given before having to make a decision since both aspects are costly. An example is the hiring of a committee with a fixed salary budget: more…