Related papers: What Should We Optimize in Participatory Budgeting…
Crowdsourcing provides a popular paradigm for data collection at scale. We study the problem of selecting subsets of workers from a given worker pool to maximize the accuracy under a budget constraint. One natural question is whether we…
We consider a social choice problem where only a small number of people out of a large population are sufficiently available or motivated to vote. A common solution to increase participation is to allow voters use a proxy, that is, transfer…
The executive branch, or government, is typically not elected directly by the people, but rather formed by another elected body or person such as the parliament or the president. As a result, its members are not directly accountable to the…
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:…
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…
Proponents of participatory democracy praise Liquid Democracy: decisions are taken by referendum, but voters delegate their votes freely. When better informed voters are present, delegation can increase the probability of a correct…
Reaching some form of consensus is often necessary for autonomous agents that want to coordinate their actions or otherwise engage in joint activities. One way to reach a consensus is by aggregating individual information, such as…
Judgment aggregation problems form a class of collective decision-making problems represented in an abstract way, subsuming some well known problems such as voting. A collective decision can be reached in many ways, but a direct one-step…
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…
How should one combine noisy information from diverse sources to make an inference about an objective ground truth? This frequently recurring, normative question lies at the core of statistics, machine learning, policy-making, and everyday…
Citizens' assemblies are a form of democratic innovation in which a randomly selected panel of constituents deliberates on questions of public interest. We study a novel goal for the selection of panel members: maximizing the entropy of the…
Experiments deliver credible treatment-effect estimates but, because they are costly, are often restricted to specific sites, small populations, or particular mechanisms. A common practice across several fields is therefore to combine…
We study the formation of public opinion in a poll process where the current score is open to public. The voters are assumed to vote probabilistically for or against their own preference considering the group opinion collected up to then in…
Collaborative recommendation is an information-filtering technique that attempts to present information items (movies, music, books, news, images, Web pages, etc.) that are likely of interest to the Internet user. Traditionally,…
We study situations where a group of voters need to take a collective decision over a number of public issues, with the goal of getting a result that reflects the voters' opinions in a proportional manner. Our focus is on interconnected…
Collective intelligence is believed to underly the remarkable success of human society. The formation of accurate shared beliefs is one of the key components of human collective intelligence. How are accurate shared beliefs formed in groups…
Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…
In recent years, research unveiled more and more evidence for the so-called Bayesian Brain Paradigm, i.e. the human brain is interpreted as a probabilistic inference machine and Bayesian modelling approaches are hence used successfully. One…
In this paper, we investigate deliberation procedures that invite citizens with contextual opinions to explore alternative thinking frames. Contextuality is captured in a simple quantum cognitive model. We show how disagreeing citizens…
Artificial intelligence is increasingly deployed to synthesize large-scale public input in policy consultations and participatory processes. Yet no formal framework exists for auditing whether these summaries faithfully represent the source…