Related papers: Who Controls the Agenda Controls the Polity
This paper studies delegation in a model of discrete choice. In the delegation problem, an uninformed principal must consult an informed agent to make a decision. Both the agent and principal have preferences over the decided-upon action…
Opinion Dynamics models can be, for most of them, divided between discrete and continuous. They are used in different circumstances and the relationship between them is not clear. Here we will explore the relationship between a model where…
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…
As rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and the rise of some of history's most potent corporations meet the diminished neoliberal state, people are increasingly subject to power exercised by means of automated systems. Machine learning…
The way that people make choices or exhibit preferences can be strongly affected by the set of available alternatives, often called the choice set. Furthermore, there are usually heterogeneous preferences, either at an individual level…
We study the behavior of Range Voting and Normalized Range Voting with respect to electoral control. Electoral control encompasses attempts from an election chair to alter the structure of an election in order to change the outcome. We show…
We present a new model that describes the process of electing a group of representatives (e.g., a parliament) for a group of voters. In this model, called the voting committee model, the elected group of representatives runs a number of…
We study control problems in the context of matching under preferences: We examine how a central authority, called the controller, can manipulate an instance of the Stable Marriage or Stable Roommates problems in order to achieve certain…
The relationship of policy choice by majority voting and by maximization of utilitarian welfare has long been discussed. I consider choice between a status quo and a proposed policy when persons have interpersonally comparable cardinal…
Notwithstanding the usefulness of system dynamics in analyzing complex policy problems, policy design is far from straightforward and in many instances trial-and-error driven. To address this challenge, we propose to combine system dynamics…
Understanding how individuals change their opinions is essential to mitigate the harmful effect of fake news and stop opinion polarization. Building upon an extremely flexible opinion dynamics model that can capture the key microscopic…
The outcomes of democratic elections rest on individuals' decision-making that is driven by their varying preferences and beliefs. Individuals may prefer consensus to gridlock, or gridlock to consensus, and information may be fractured via…
The purpose of this review paper is to present some recent results on the modeling and control of large systems of agents. We focus on particular applications where the agents are capable of independent actions instead of simply reacting to…
We study the susceptibility of committee governance (e.g. by boards of directors), modelled as the collective determination of a ranking of a set of alternatives, to manipulation of the order in which pairs of alternatives are voted on --…
We study the voting game where agents' preferences are endogenously decided by the information they receive, and they can collaborate in a group. We show that strategic voting behaviors have a positive impact on leading to the ``correct''…
In many collective decision making situations, agents vote to choose an alternative that best represents the preferences of the group. Agents may manipulate the vote to achieve a better outcome by voting in a way that does not reflect their…
Humans have come to rely on machines for reducing excessive information to manageable representations. But this reliance can be abused -- strategic machines might craft representations that manipulate their users. How can a user make good…
We consider the problem of steering a multi-agent system to multi-consensus, namely a regime where groups of agents agree on a given value which may be different from group to group. We first address the problem by using distributed…
As predictive models are deployed into the real world, they must increasingly contend with strategic behavior. A growing body of work on strategic classification treats this problem as a Stackelberg game: the decision-maker "leads" in the…
In this paper we propose a novel control approach for opinion dynamics on evolving networks. The controls modify the strength of connections in the network, rather than influencing opinions directly, with the overall goal of steering the…