Related papers: The Price of Majority Support
The legitimacy of bottom-up democratic processes for the distribution of public funds by policy-makers is challenging and complex. Participatory budgeting is such a process, where voting outcomes may not always be fair or inclusive.…
We study a model of consensus decision making, in which a finite group of Bayesian agents has to choose between one of two courses of action. Each member of the group has a private and independent signal at his or her disposal, giving some…
We investigate majority rule dynamics in a population with two classes of people, each with two opinion states $\pm 1$, and with tunable interactions between people in different classes. In an update, a randomly selected group adopts the…
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…
We study proportional representation in the temporal voting model, where collective decisions are made repeatedly over time over a fixed horizon. Prior work has extensively investigated how proportional representation axioms from…
A voter sits on each vertex of an infinite tree of degree $k$, and has to decide between two alternative opinions. At each time step, each voter switches to the opinion of the majority of her neighbors. We analyze this majority process when…
A population of voters must elect representatives among themselves to decide on a sequence of possibly unforeseen binary issues. Voters care only about the final decision, not the elected representatives. The disutility of a voter is…
Counterfactual explanations are usually obtained by identifying the smallest change made to an input to change a prediction made by a fixed model (hereafter called sparse methods). Recent work, however, has revitalized an old insight: there…
Complex decision-making systems rarely have direct access to the current state of the world and they instead rely on opinions to form an understanding of what the ground truth could be. Even in problems where experts provide opinions…
The number of topics might be the most important parameter of a topic model. The topic modelling community has developed a set of various procedures to estimate the number of topics in a dataset, but there has not yet been a sufficiently…
Given the stated preferences of several people over a number of proposals regarding public policy initiatives, some of those proposals might be judged to be more ``divisive'' than others. When designing online participatory platforms to…
A major challenge in sparsity pattern estimation is that small modes are difficult to detect in the presence of noise. This problem is alleviated if one can observe samples from multiple realizations of the nonzero values for the same…
We study consensus processes on the complete graph of $n$ nodes. Initially, each node supports one from up to n opinions. Nodes randomly and in parallel sample the opinions of constant many nodes. Based on these samples, they use an update…
We study settings in which agents with incomplete preferences need to make a collective decision. We focus on a process of majority dynamics where issues are addressed one at a time and undecided agents follow the opinion of the majority.…
We tackle the problem of computing a consensus according to multiple ethical principles -- which can include, for example, the principle of maximum freedom associated with the Benthamite doctrine and the principle of maximum fairness…
We consider the \emph{exact plurality consensus} problem for \emph{population protocols}. Here, $n$ anonymous agents start each with one of $k$ opinions. Their goal is to agree on the initially most frequent opinion (the \emph{plurality…
We suggest that one individual holds multiple degrees of belief about an outcome, given the evidence. We then investigate the implications of such noisy probabilities for a buyer and a seller of binary options and find the odds agreed upon…
Like many other voting systems, Majority Judgement suffers from the weaknesses of the underlying mathematical model: Elections as problem of choice or ranking. We show how the model can be enhanced to take into account the complete process…
We study the problem of minimizing metric distortion in multi-winner elections, where a committee of size $k$ is selected from a set of candidates based on voters' ordinal preferences. We assume that voters and candidates are embedded on a…
The question of how people form their opinion has fascinated economists and sociologists for quite some time. In many of the models, a group of people in a social network, each holding a numerical opinion, arrive at a shared opinion through…