Related papers: Who Controls the Agenda Controls the Polity

Delegation allows an agent to request that another agent completes a task. In many situations the task may be delegated onwards, and this process can repeat until it is eventually, successfully or unsuccessfully, performed. We consider…

Population protocols are a relatively novel computational model in which very resource-limited anonymous agents interact in pairs with the goal of computing predicates. We consider the probabilistic version of this model, which naturally…

Two of the main factors shaping an individual's opinion are social coordination and personal preferences, or personal biases. To understand the role of those and that of the topology of the network of interactions, we study an extension of…

In economic theory, an agent chooses from available alternatives -- modeled as a set. In decisions in the field or in the lab, however, agents do not have access to the set of alternatives at once. Instead, alternatives are represented by…

A recently proposed model of social interaction in voting is investigated by simplifying it down into a version that is more analytically tractable and which allows a mathematical analysis to be performed. This analysis clarifies the…

We study the parameterized control complexity of fallback voting, a voting system that combines preference-based with approval voting. Electoral control is one of many different ways for an external agent to tamper with the outcome of an…

There has been much recent work on multiwinner voting systems. However, sometimes a committee is highly structured, and if we want to vote for such a committee, our voting method should be more structured as well. We consider committees…

This chapter addresses the question of who benefits from forecasting, using Forecasting for Social Good as a motivating framework. Barriers to broadening the base of beneficiaries are identified, and some parallels are drawn with similar…

We consider a setting with agents that have preferences over alternatives and are partitioned into disjoint districts. The goal is to choose one alternative as the winner using a mechanism which first decides a representative alternative…

We initiate a novel direction in randomized social choice by proposing a new definition of agent utility for randomized outcomes. Each agent has a preference over all outcomes and a {\em quantile} parameter. Given a {\em lottery} over the…

This paper considers the scenario in which there are multiple institutions, each with a limited capacity for candidates, and candidates, each with preferences over the institutions. A central entity evaluates the utility of each candidate…

It is known that individual opinions on different policy issues often align to a dominant ideological dimension (e.g. "left" vs. "right") and become increasingly polarized. We provide an agent-based model that reproduces these two stylized…

Most work on manipulation assumes that all preferences are known to the manipulators. However, in many settings elections are open and sequential, and manipulators may know the already cast votes but may not know the future votes. We…

Decision procedures aggregating the preferences of multiple agents can produce cycles and hence outcomes which have been described heuristically as `chaotic'. We make this description precise by constructing an explicit dynamical system…

Iterative voting is a natural model of repeated strategic decision-making in social choice theory when agents have the opportunity to update their votes prior to finalizing the group decision. Prior work has analyzed the efficacy of…

In this work, we focus on strategies to influence the opinion dynamics of a well-connected society. We propose a generalization of the popular voter model. This variant of the voter model can capture a wide range of individuals including…

Networked multi-agent dynamical systems have been used to model how individual opinions evolve over time due to the opinions of other agents in the network. Particularly, such a model has been used to study how a planning agent can be used…

Collective behavior of the complex socio-economic systems is heavily influenced by the herding, group, behavior of individuals. The importance of the herding behavior may enable the control of the collective behavior of the individuals. In…

Recent empirical findings suggest that societies have become more polarized in various countries. That is, the median voter of today represents a smaller fraction of society compared to two decades ago and yet, the mechanisms underlying…

Selective rationalization has become a common mechanism to ensure that predictive models reveal how they use any available features. The selection may be soft or hard, and identifies a subset of input features relevant for prediction. The…