Related papers: The Price of Majority Support
We report an inconsistency found in probability theory (also referred to as measure-theoretic probability). For probability measures induced by real-valued random variables, we deduce an "equality" such that one side of the "equality" is a…
Condorcet's jury theorem states that the correct outcome is reached in direct majority voting systems with sufficiently large electorates as long as each voter's independent probability of voting for that outcome is greater than 0.5. Yet,…
Being able to infer ground truth from the responses of multiple imperfect advisors is a problem of crucial importance in many decision-making applications, such as lending, trading, investment, and crowd-sourcing. In practice, however,…
Wisdom of the crowd revealed a striking fact that the majority answer from a crowd is often more accurate than any individual expert. We observed the same story in machine learning--ensemble methods leverage this idea to combine multiple…
Crowdsourcing can solve problems that current fully automated systems cannot. Its effectiveness depends on the reliability, accuracy, and speed of the crowd workers that drive it. These objectives are frequently at odds with one another.…
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…
How do movements and coalitions which engage with multiple social issues succeed in cross-issue solidarity, and when do they instead become fragmented? To address this, the mechanisms of cross-issue interaction have to be understood. Prior…
Objective estimators of multimedia quality are often judged by comparing estimates with subjective "truth data," most often via Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) or mean-squared error (MSE). But subjective test results contain noise, so…
We present a new model of collective decision making that captures important crowd-funding and donor coordination scenarios. In the setting, there is a set of projects (each with its own cost) and a set of agents (that have their budgets as…
We consider two canonical Bayesian mechanism design settings. In the single-item setting, we prove tight approximation ratio for anonymous pricing: compared with Myerson Auction, it extracts at least $\frac{1}{2.62}$-fraction of revenue;…
Incorporating fairness criteria in optimization problems comes at a certain cost, which is measured by the so-called price of fairness. Here we consider the allocation of indivisible goods. For envy-freeness as fairness criterion it is…
In robust decision-making under non-Bayesian uncertainty, different robust optimization criteria, such as maximin performance, minimax regret, and maximin ratio, have been proposed. In many problems, all three criteria are well-motivated…
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…
There is a paradox in the model of social dynamics determined by voting in a stochastic environment (the ViSE model) called "pit of losses." It consists in the fact that a series of democratic decisions may systematically lead the society…
We focus on a generalization of the classic Minisum approval voting rule, introduced by Barrot and Lang (2016), and referred to as Conditional Minisum (CMS), for multi-issue elections with preferential dependencies. Under this rule, voters…
To understand and summarize approval preferences and other binary evaluation data, it is useful to order the items on an axis which explains the data. In a political election using approval voting, this could be an ideological left-right…
Mutual information is commonly used as a measure of similarity between competing labelings of a given set of objects, for example to quantify performance in classification and community detection tasks. As argued recently, however, the…
Classical results in voting theory show that strategic manipulation by voters is inevitable if a voting rule simultaneously satisfy certain desirable properties. Motivated by this, we study the relevant question of how often a voting rule…
Accepting a proposition means that our confidence in this proposition is strictly greater than the confidence in its negation. This paper investigates the subclass of uncertainty measures, expressing confidence, that capture the idea 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…