Related papers: Welfare vs. Representation in Participatory Budget…
The study of proportionality in multiwinner voting with approval ballots has received much attention in recent years. Typically, proportionality is captured by variants of the Justified Representation axiom, which say that cohesive groups…
We present an alternative voting system that aims at bridging the gap between proportional representative systems and majoritarian, single winner election systems. The system lets people vote for multiple parties, but then assigns each…
Conventional automated decision-support systems often prioritize predictive accuracy, overlooking the complexities of real-world settings where stakeholders' preferences may diverge or conflict. This can lead to outcomes that disadvantage…
We consider social resource allocations that deliver an array of scarce supports to a diverse population. Such allocations pervade social service delivery, such as provision of homeless services, assignment of refugees to cities, among…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a form of citizen participation that allows citizens to decide how public funds are spent. Through an election, citizens express their preferences on various projects (spending proposals). A voting mechanism…
Welfare economics relies on access to agents' utility functions: we revisit classical questions in welfare economics, assuming access to data on agents' past choices instead of their utilities. Our main result considers the existence of…
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…
Machine learning systems are increasingly used to make decisions about people's lives, such as whether to give someone a loan or whether to interview someone for a job. This has led to considerable interest in making such machine learning…
Selective contests can impair participants' overall welfare in overcompetitive environments, such as school admissions. This paper models the situation as an optimal contest design problem with binary actions, treating effort costs as…
In this paper we extend the principle of proportional representation to rankings. We consider the setting where alternatives need to be ranked based on approval preferences. In this setting, proportional representation requires that…
In various markets where sellers compete in price, price oscillations are observed rather than convergence to equilibrium. Such fluctuations have been empirically observed in the retail market for gasoline, in airline pricing and in the…
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…
Representativeness is a foundational yet slippery concept. Though familiar at first blush, it lacks a single precise meaning. Instead, meanings range from typical or characteristic, to a proportionate match between sample and population, to…
Machine learning is increasingly used in government programs to identify and support the most vulnerable individuals, prioritizing assistance for those at greatest risk over optimizing aggregate outcomes. This paper examines the welfare…
We consider the participatory budgeting problem where each of $n$ voters specifies additive utilities over $m$ candidate projects with given sizes, and the goal is to choose a subset of projects (i.e., a committee) with total size at most…
We consider randomized mechanisms with optional participation. Preferences over lotteries are modeled using skew-symmetric bilinear (SSB) utility functions, a generalization of classic von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions. We show that…
The development of state-of-the-art systems in different applied areas of machine learning (ML) is driven by benchmarks, which have shaped the paradigm of evaluating generalisation capabilities from multiple perspectives. Although the…
Criteria for a good voting system have been given particularly careful scrutiny in recent years, with general agreement that the core values are fair results, voter power and choice, and local representation. This paper reexamines the basic…
Direct democracy is a special case of an ensemble of classifiers, where every person (classifier) votes on every issue. This fails when the average voter competence (classifier accuracy) falls below 50%, which can happen in noisy settings…
In computational social choice, the distortion of a voting rule quantifies the degree to which the rule overcomes limited preference information to select a socially desirable outcome. This concept has been investigated extensively, but…