Related papers: Who Controls the Agenda Controls the Polity

When allocating indivisible items to agents, it is known that the only strategyproof mechanisms that satisfy a set of rather mild conditions are constrained serial dictatorships: given a fixed order over agents, at each step the designated…

Voting is the aggregation of individual preferences in order to select a winning alternative. Selection of a winner is accomplished via a voting rule, e.g., rank-order voting, majority rule, plurality rule, approval voting. Which voting…

Algorithmic predictions are increasingly informing societal resource allocations by identifying individuals for targeting. Policymakers often build these systems with the assumption that by gathering more observations on individuals, they…

The Hotelling-Downs model considers parties changing policy to maximise their vote-share. Where policy position lies on a left-right axis, it describes a tendency for political parties to move towards centrist platforms. This is in contrast…

The voter model is a toy model of consensus formation based on nearest-neighbor interactions. A voter sits at each vertex in a hypercubic lattice (of dimension $d$) and is in one of two possible opinion states. The opinion state of each…

We study voting games on binary issues, where voters hold an objective over the outcome of the collective decision and are allowed, before the vote takes place, to negotiate their voting strategy with the other participants. We analyse the…

We study the effects of social influences in opinion dynamics. In particular, we define a simple model, based on the majority rule voting, in order to consider the role of conformity. Conformity is a central issue in social psychology as it…

The voter model consists of a set of agents whose opinion is a binary variable. At each time step, an agent along with a social neighbor is selected and the agent imitates the social neighbor at the next time step. In this paper, we study a…

In recent years, a myriad of superlative works on intelligent robotics policies have been done, thanks to advances in machine learning. However, inefficiency and lack of transfer ability hindered algorithms from pragmatic applications,…

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…

Systematically biased forecasts are typically interpreted as evidence of forecasters' irrationality and/or asymmetric loss. In this paper we propose an alternative explanation: when forecasts inform policy decisions, and the resulting…

I study the optimal voting mechanism for a committee that must decide whether to enact or block a policy of unknown benefit. Information can come both from committee members who can acquire it at cost, and a strategic lobbyist who wishes…

We investigate a variation of the classical voter model in which the set of influencing agents depends on an individual's current opinion. The initial population consists of a random sample of equally sized sub-populations for each state,…

Spatial voting models of legislators' preferences are used in political science to test theories about their voting behavior. These models posit that legislators' ideologies as well as the ideologies reflected in votes for and against a…

I introduce a model of predictive scoring. A receiver wants to predict a sender's quality. An intermediary observes multiple features of the sender and aggregates them into a score. Based on the score, the receiver makes a decision. The…

Two agents repeatedly compete for the power to set policy. A principal partially influences the power allocation. All three players may disagree on policy, but one agent (the ``friend'') aligns more closely with the principal than the other…

The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…

This paper describes an agent-based model of a finite group of agents in a single population who each choose which convention to advocate, and which convention to practice. Influences or dependencies in agents choice exists in the form of…

Electoral control refers to attempts by an election's organizer ("the chair") to influence the outcome by adding/deleting/partitioning voters or candidates. The groundbreaking work of Bartholdi, Tovey, and Trick [BTT92] on (constructive)…

We study a networked version of the minority game in which agents can choose to follow the choices made by a neighbouring agent in a social network. We show that for a wide variety of networks a leadership structure always emerges, with…