Related papers: Liquid Democracy. Two Experiments on Delegation in…

Which level of voting costs is optimal in a democracy? This paper argues that intermediate voting costs - what we term a "Midcost democracy" - should be avoided, as they fail to ensure that electoral outcomes reflect the preferences of the…

This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…

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…

Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a process in which voters decide how to allocate a common budget; most commonly it is done by ordinary people -- in particular, residents of some municipality -- to decide on a fraction of the municipal…

By classic results in social choice theory, any reasonable preferential voting method sometimes gives individuals an incentive to report an insincere preference. The extent to which different voting methods are more or less resistant to…

When should we delegate decisions to AI systems? While the value alignment literature has developed techniques for shaping AI values, less attention has been paid to how to determine, under uncertainty, when imperfect alignment is good…

Human decision making can be challenging to predict because decisions are affected by a number of complex factors. Adding to this complexity, decision-making processes can differ considerably between individuals, and methods aimed at…

Participatory budgeting is one of the exciting developments in deliberative grassroots democracy. We concentrate on approval elections and propose proportional representation axioms in participatory budgeting, by generalizing relevant…

An election is a process through which citizens in liberal democracies select their governing bodies, usually through voting. For elections to be truly honest, people must be able to vote freely without being subject to coercion; that is…

Politics around the world exhibits increasing polarization, demonstrated in part by rigid voting configurations in institutions like legislatures or courts. A crux of polarization is separation along a unidimensional ideological axis, but…

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…

A central feature of many deliberative processes, such as citizens' assemblies and deliberative polls, is the opportunity for participants to engage directly with experts. While participants are typically invited to propose questions for…

In the last decade, crowdsourcing has become a popular method for conducting quantitative empirical studies in human-machine interaction. The remote work on a given task in crowdworking settings suits the character of typical…

In voting, disputes arise when a voter claims that the voting authority is dishonest and did not correctly process his ballot while the authority claims to have followed the protocol. A dispute can be resolved if any third party can…

The mathematical study of voting, social choice theory, has traditionally only been applicable to choices among a few predetermined alternatives, but not to open-ended decisions such as collectively selecting a textual statement. We…

Crowdsourcing is being increasingly adopted as a platform to run studies with human subjects. Running a crowdsourcing experiment involves several choices and strategies to successfully port an experimental design into an otherwise…

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.…

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 offers a framework for the study of strategic behavior in proxy voting, where non-active voters delegate their votes to active voters. We further study how proxy voting affects the strategic behavior of non-active voters and…

In the traditional voting manipulation literature, it is assumed that a group of manipulators jointly misrepresent their preferences to get a certain candidate elected, while the remaining voters are truthful. In this paper, we depart from…