Related papers: Political districting without geography
Algorithmic and statistical approaches to congressional redistricting are becoming increasingly valuable tools in courts and redistricting commissions for quantifying gerrymandering in the United States. While there is existing literature…
Assessing the spatial fairness of predictive models involves establishing whether they are statistically penalizing (favoring) individuals associated with certain geographical locations. Literature on this topic makes the fundamental…
An urban planner might design the spatial layout of transportation amenities so as to improve accessibility for underserved communities -- a fairness objective. However, implementing such a design might trigger processes of neighborhood…
Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…
Congressional district lines in many U.S. states are drawn by partisan actors, raising concerns about gerrymandering. To separate the partisan effects of redistricting from the effects of other factors including geography and redistricting…
The map of elections framework is a methodology for visualizing and analyzing election datasets. So far, the framework was restricted to elections that have equal numbers of candidates, equal numbers of voters, and where all the (ordinal)…
This paper investigates why and when the edge-based districting problem becomes computationally intractable. The overall problem is represented as an exact mathematical programming formulation consisting of an objective function and several…
Competition is a major force in structuring ecological communities. The strength of competition can be measured using the concept of a niche. A niche comprises the set of requirements of an organism in terms of habitat, environment and…
Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing biased electoral maps that manipulate the voter population to gain an advantage. The most recent time gerrymandering became an issue was 2019 when the U.S. Federal Supreme Court decided that the…
Are there multiple equilibria in the spatial economy? This paper develops a unified framework that integrates systems of cities and regional models to address this question within a general geographic space. A key feature is the endogenous…
Supply chain network is critical to serving customers, so the most common practices are to determine the number, location, and capacity of facilities. But at the same time, uncertainties and risks must be taken into account in order to…
Redistricting practitioners must balance many competing constraints and criteria when drawing district boundaries. To aid in this process, researchers have developed many methods for optimizing districting plans according to one or more…
Resource allocation problems are a fundamental domain in which to evaluate the fairness properties of algorithms. The trade-offs between fairness and utilization have a long history in this domain. A recent line of work has considered…
Human flourishing is often severely limited by persistent violence. Quantitative conflict research has found common temporal and other statistical patterns in warfare, but very little is understood about its general spatial patterns. While…
Decision-making problems in uncertain or stochastic domains are often formulated as Markov decision processes (MDPs). Policy iteration (PI) is a popular algorithm for searching over policy-space, the size of which is exponential in the…
In this work, we consider a method of searching of the direction of a wireless network development (the places of new access points or base stations etc.) optimized with criteria of coverage of important territories and minimum cost of…
While compactness is an essential assumption for many results in dynamical systems theory, for many applications the state space is only locally compact. Here we provide a general theory for compactifying such systems, i.e. embedding them…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
Regionalization, spatially contiguous clustering, provides a means to reduce the effect of noise in sampled data and identify homogeneous areas for policy development among many other applications. Existing regionalization methods require…
As a case study into an algorithmic approach to congressional districting, North Carolina provides a lot to explore. Statistical modeling has called into question whether recent North Carolina district plans are unbiased. In particular, the…