Related papers: Rationalizing systematic discrepancies between ele…

There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…

Polls posted on social media have emerged in recent years as an important tool for estimating public opinion, e.g., to gauge public support for business decisions and political candidates in national elections. Here, we examine nearly two…

The democratization of AI tools for content generation, combined with unrestricted access to mass media for all (e.g. through microblogging and social media), makes it increasingly hard for people to distinguish fact from fiction. This…

In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…

Optimizing recommender systems based on user interaction data is mainly seen as a problem of dealing with selection bias, where most existing work assumes that interactions from different users are independent. However, it has been shown…

In light of the classic impossibility results of Arrow and Gibbard and Satterthwaite regarding voting with ordinal rules, there has been recent interest in characterizing how well common voting rules approximate the social optimum. In order…

The election control problem through social influence asks to find a set of nodes in a social network of voters to be the starters of a political campaign aiming at supporting a given target candidate. Voters reached by the campaign change…

There are many factors that can influence the outcome of an election. We here identify two dominant effects that can affect the votes obtained by a candidate, namely, the Majority Effect and the Media Effect. We mimic these two effects in a…

Biases with respect to socially-salient attributes of individuals have been well documented in evaluation processes used in settings such as admissions and hiring. We view such an evaluation process as a transformation of a distribution of…

Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…

Social influence profoundly impacts individual choices and collective behaviors in politics. In this work, driven by the goal of protecting elections from improper influence, we consider the following scenario: an individual, who has vested…

The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…

The resilience of a voting system has been a central topic in computational social choice. Many voting rules, like plurality, are shown to be vulnerable as the attacker can target specific voters to manipulate the result. What if a local…

We consider elections where both voters and candidates can be associated with points in a metric space and voters prefer candidates that are closer to those that are farther away. It is often assumed that the optimal candidate is the one…

Recovering and distinguishing between the strict-preference, indifference and/or indecisiveness parts of a decision maker's preferences is a challenging task but also important for testing theory and conducting welfare analysis. This paper…

We use causal inference to study how designing ballots with and without party designations impacts electoral outcomes when partisan voters rely on party-order cues to infer candidate affiliation in races without designations. If the party…

We consider missingness in the context of causal inference when the outcome of interest may be missing. If the outcome directly affects its own missingness status, i.e., it is "self-censoring", this may lead to severely biased causal effect…

We consider the problem of evaluating the performance of a decision policy using past observational data. The outcome of a policy is measured in terms of a loss (aka. disutility or negative reward) and the main problem is making valid…

Confirmation bias and peer pressure both have substantial impacts on the formation of collective decisions. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to study how the interplay between these two mechanisms affects public opinion evolution.…

We study an outcome of a vote in a population of voters exposed to an externally applied bias in favour of one of two potential candidates. The population consists of ordinary individuals, that are in majority and tend to align their…