Related papers: Who Controls the Agenda Controls the Polity
A set of agents has to make a decision about the provision of a public good and its financing. Agents have heterogeneous values for the public good and each agent's value is private information. An agenda-setter has the right to make a…
How does targeted advertising influence electoral outcomes? This paper presents a one-dimensional spatial model of voting in which a privately informed challenger persuades voters to support him over the status quo. I show that targeted…
Constructive election control considers the problem of an adversary who seeks to sway the outcome of an electoral process in order to ensure that their favored candidate wins. We consider the computational problem of constructive election…
Control and manipulation are two of the most studied types of attacks on elections. In this paper, we study the complexity of control attacks on elections in which there are manipulators. We study both the case where the "chair" who is…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
Independent voters play an increasingly decisive role in contemporary elections, yet their collective behavior remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how a minority of voters with greater flexibility in their political…
We study situations where a group of voters need to take a collective decision over a number of public issues, with the goal of getting a result that reflects the voters' opinions in a proportional manner. Our focus is on interconnected…
We propose a general framework for strategic voting when a voter may lack knowledge about other votes or about other voters' knowledge about her own vote. In this setting we define notions of manipulation and equilibrium. We also model…
We study the election control problem with multi-votes, where each voter can present a single vote according different views (or layers, we use "layer" to represent "view"). For example, according to the attributes of candidates, such as:…
In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting. Moreover, scenarios such as committee or board elections require voting rules that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent may vote…
In a strategy-proof mechanism, the influence of an agent may be measured as the set of outcomes an agent can bring about by varying her (reported) type. More specifically, we refer to an agent's influence on her own relevant outcomes as her…
This paper focuses on a model for opinion dynamics, where the influence weights of agents evolve in time. We formulate a control problem of consensus type, in which the objective is to drive all agents to a final target point under suitable…
We investigate opinion dynamics in multi-agent networks when a bias toward one of two possible opinions exists; for example, reflecting a status quo vs a superior alternative. Starting with all agents sharing an initial opinion representing…
This paper presents a theoretical model of an autocrat who controls the media in an attempt to persuade society of his competence. We base our analysis on a Bayesian persuasion framework in which citizens have heterogeneous preferences and…
Is it more effective to have a strong influence over a small domain, or a weaker influence over a larger one? Here, we introduce and analyse an off-lattice generalisation of the voter model, in which the range and strength of agents'…
In many instances of election, the electorate appears to be a composite of partisan and independent voters. Given that partisans are not likely to convert to a different party, a main goal for a party could be to mobilize independent voters…
Consideration was given to a model of social dynamics controlled by successive collective decisions based on the threshold majority procedures. The current system state is characterized by the vector of participants' capitals (utilities).…
We address the link between the controllability or observability of a stochastic complex system and concepts of information theory. We show that the most influential degrees of freedom can be detected without acting on the system, by…
Norms have been extensively proposed as coordination mechanisms for both agent and human societies. Nevertheless, choosing the norms to regulate a society is by no means straightforward. The reasons are twofold. First, the norms to choose…
It is well known that no reasonable voting rule is strategyproof. Moreover, the common Plurality rule is particularly prone to strategic behavior of the voters and empirical studies show that people often vote strategically in practice.…