Related papers: Rationalizing systematic discrepancies between ele…
In approval-based multiwinner voting, voters express approval preferences over a set of candidates, and the goal is to return a winning committee. This model captures a broad range of subset selection problems under preferences. Prior work…
Polarization is a problem in modern society. Understanding how opinions evolve through social interactions is crucial for addressing conditions that lead to polarization, consensus, or opinion diversity. Classical opinion dynamics models…
Forecasting elections -- a challenging, high-stakes problem -- is the subject of much uncertainty, subjectivity, and media scrutiny. To shed light on this process, we develop a method for forecasting elections from the perspective of…
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…
One of the main dimensions characterizing the unfolding of opinion formation processes in social debates is the degree of open-mindedness of the involved population. Opinion dynamic modeling studies have tried to capture such a peculiar…
This paper introduces a model for opinion dynamics, where at each time step, randomly selected agents see their opinions - modeled as scalars in [0,1] - evolve depending on a local interaction function. In the classical Bounded Confidence…
Prediction polling is an increasingly popular form of crowdsourcing in which multiple participants estimate the probability or magnitude of some future event. These estimates are then aggregated into a single forecast. Historically,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are a transformational technology, fundamentally changing how people obtain information and interact with the world. As people become increasingly reliant on them for an enormous variety of tasks, a body of…
In this paper, the influence of the social media on the opinion formation process is modeled during an election campaign. In the proposed model, peer- to-peer interactions and targeted online propaganda messages are assumed to be the…
We present a novel model for the effect of echo chambers, filter bubbles, and reinforcement on election results. Our model extends the well known voter model with zealots to include reinforcement. We analyze the behaviour of the model,…
Many experiments elicit subjects' prior and posterior beliefs about a random variable to assess how information affects one's own actions. However, beliefs are multi-dimensional objects, and experimenters often only elicit a single response…
Correlated proportions arise in longitudinal (panel) studies. A typical example is the ``opinion swing'' problem: ``Has the proportion of people favoring a politician changed after his recent speech to the nation on TV?''. Since the same…
We consider a problem of ecological inference, in which individual-level covariates are known, but labeled data is available only at the aggregate level. The intended application is modeling voter preferences in elections. In Rosenman and…
We examine the effects of introducing a political outsider to the nomination process leading to an election. To this end, we develop a sequential game where politicians -- insiders and outsiders -- make a platform offer to a party, and…
Existing approaches to model uncertainty typically either compare models using a quantitative model selection criterion or evaluate posterior model probabilities having set a prior. In this paper, we propose an alternative strategy which…
We initiate the work towards a comprehensive picture of the smoothed satisfaction of voting axioms, to provide a finer and more realistic foundation for comparing voting rules. We adopt the smoothed social choice framework, where an…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
Election control considers the problem of an adversary who attempts to tamper with a voting process, in order to either ensure that their favored candidate wins (constructive control) or another candidate loses (destructive control). As…
Background: Confirmation bias is the tendency to acquire or evaluate new information in a way that is consistent with one's preexisting beliefs. It is omnipresent in psychology, economics, and even scientific practices. Prior theoretical…
Learning a reward model (RM) from human preferences has been an important component in aligning large language models (LLMs). The canonical setup of learning RMs from pairwise preference data is rooted in the classic Bradley-Terry (BT)…