Related papers: Who Controls the Agenda Controls the Polity

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…

Decisions are often made by heterogeneous groups of individuals, each with distinct initial biases and access to information of different quality. We show that in large groups of independent agents who accumulate evidence the first to…

While lobbying has been demonstrated to have an important effect on public opinion and policy making, existing models of opinion formation do not specifically include its effect. In this work we introduce a new model of lobbying-driven…

We present a new strategic voting model where we use uncertainty representation to model preferences. Specifically, we use probability sets as uncertainty representations, together with lower and upper expected utility gains to take…

Present bias, the tendency to weigh costs and benefits incurred in the present too heavily, is one of the most widespread human behavioral biases. It has also been the subject of extensive study in the behavioral economics literature. While…

Algorithms are used to aid human decision makers by making predictions and recommending decisions. Currently, these algorithms are trained to optimize prediction accuracy. What if they were optimized to control final decisions? In this…

Within the framework of the ViSE (Voting in a Stochastic Environment) model, we examine the dynamics in a society, part of which can be considered an elite. The model allows us to analyze the influence of social attitudes, such as…

We consider settings where an uninformed principal must hear arguments from two better-informed agents, corresponding to two possible courses of action that they argue for. The arguments are verifiable in the sense that the true state of…

Multi-winner voting is the process of selecting a fixed-size set of representative candidates based on voters' preferences. It occurs in applications ranging from politics (parliamentary elections) to the design of modern computer…

We introduce a new setting where a population of agents, each modelled by a finite-state system, are controlled uniformly: the controller applies the same action to every agent. The framework is largely inspired by the control of a…

In a voting problem with a finite set of alternatives to choose from, we study the manipulation of tops-only rules. Since all non-dictatorial (onto) voting rules are manipulable when there are more than two alternatives and all preferences…

In goal-directed behavior, a large number of possible initial states end up in the pursued goal. The accompanying information loss implies that goal-oriented behavior is in one-to-one correspondence with an open subsystem whose entropy…

An abstract architecture for idealized multi-agent systems whose behaviour is regulated by normative systems is developed and discussed. Agent choices are determined partially by the preference ordering of possible states and partially by…

Liquid democracy is a form of transitive delegative democracy that has received a flurry of scholarly attention from the computer science community in recent years. In its simplest form, every agent starts with one vote and may have other…

Social predictions do not passively describe the future; they actively shape it. They inform actions and change individual expectations in ways that influence the likelihood of the predicted outcome. Given these dynamics, to what extent can…

This paper studies the evolution of the distribution of opinions in a population of individuals in which there exist two distinct subgroups of highly-committed, well-connected opinion leaders endowed with a strong convincing power. Each…

We consider the problem of manipulating elections by cloning candidates. In our model, a manipulator can replace each candidate c by several clones, i.e., new candidates that are so similar to c that each voter simply replaces c in his vote…

A sender with private preferences would like to influence a receiver's action by providing information through a statistical test. The technology for information production is controlled by a monopolist intermediary, who offers a menu of…

We present a deliberation model where a group of individuals with heterogeneous preferences iteratively forms expert committees whose members are tasked with the updating of an exogenously given status quo change proposal. Every individual…

We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…