Related papers: The Price of Majority Support
In this paper, we study a new stochastic submodular maximization problem with state-dependent costs and rejections. The input of our problem is a budget constraint $B$, and a set of items whose states (i.e., the marginal contribution and…
We consider the following distributed consensus problem: Each node in a complete communication network of size $n$ initially holds an \emph{opinion}, which is chosen arbitrarily from a finite set $\Sigma$. The system must converge toward a…
In perpetual voting, multiple decisions are made at different moments in time. Taking the history of previous decisions into account allows us to satisfy properties such as proportionality over periods of time. In this paper, we consider…
Every day, we judge the probability of propositions. When we communicate graded confidence (e.g. "I am 90% sure"), we enable others to gauge how much weight to attach to our judgment. Ideally, people should share their judgments to reach…
We investigate the potential of deliberation to create consensus among fully-informed citizens. Our approach relies on two cognitive assumptions: i. citizens need a thinking frame (or perspective) to consider an issue; and ii. citizens…
In the compromise model of Deffuant et al., opinions are real numbers between 0 and 1 and two agents are compatible if the difference of their opinions is smaller than the confidence bound parameter \epsilon. The opinions of a randomly…
Condorcet's paradox is a fundamental result in social choice theory which states that there exist elections in which, no matter which candidate wins, a majority of voters prefer a different candidate. In fact, even if we can select any $k$…
Selecting representatives based on voters' preferences is a fundamental problem in social choice theory. While cardinal utility functions offer a detailed representation of preferences, ordinal rankings are often the only available…
Voting rules allow multiple agents to aggregate their preferences in order to reach joint decisions. Perhaps one of the most important desirable properties in this context is Condorcet-consistency, which requires that a voting rule should…
During deliberation processes, mediators and facilitators typically need to select a small and representative set of opinions later used to produce digestible reports for stakeholders. In online deliberation platforms, algorithmic selection…
Many organizations describe their processes as consensus-driven, but there is no consensus on the definition of consensus. Qualitative definitions of consensus prioritize social phenomena like "unity" that are not necessarily measurable.…
Social consensus is important for society. Sometimes the success of society depends on a consensus (e.g. the decision to pay taxes or to commit to the constitution). Examples for continuous opinion dynamics are discussions about tax rates…
Platforms for online civic participation rely heavily on methods for condensing thousands of comments into a relevant handful, based on whether participants agree or disagree with them. These methods should guarantee fair representation of…
We consider an agent community wishing to decide on several binary issues by means of issue-by-issue majority voting. For each issue and each agent, one of the two options is better than the other. However, some of the agents may be…
This paper argues that, insofar as we doubt the bivalence of the Continuum Hypothesis or the truth of the Axiom of Choice, we should also doubt the consistency of third-order arithmetic, both the classical and intuitionistic versions.…
Majority voting is one of the few black-box interventions that can improve a fixed stochastic predictor: repeated access can be cheaper than changing a high-capability model. Classical fixed-competence theory makes this intervention look…
The problem of assessing the value of a candidate is viewed here as a multiple combination problem. On the one hand a candidate can be evaluated according to different criteria, and on the other hand several experts are supposed to assess…
A method is given for quantitatively rating the social acceptance of different options which are the matter of a preferential vote. In contrast to a previous article, here the individual votes are allowed to be incomplete, that is, they…
We revisit the classical decision-theoretic problem of weighted expert voting from a statistical learning perspective. In particular, we examine the consistency (both asymptotic and finitary) of the optimal Nitzan-Paroush weighted majority…
We study multiwinner elections with approval-based preferences. An instance of a multiwinner election consists of a set of alternatives, a population of voters---each voter approves a subset of alternatives, and the desired committee size…