Related papers: Computing the Best Policy That Survives a Vote

Hamilton's method (also called method of largest remainder) is a natural and common method to distribute seats proportionally between states (or parties) in a parliament. In USA it has been abandoned due to some drawbacks, in particular the…

Metric distortion in social choice is a framework for evaluating how well voting rules minimize social cost when both voters and candidates exist in a shared metric space, with a voter's cost defined by their distance to a candidate. Voters…

We consider committee election of $k \geq 2$ (out of $m \geq k+1$) candidates, where the voters and the candidates are associated with locations on the real line. Each voter's cardinal preferences over candidates correspond to her distance…

Alternative novel measures of the distance between any two partitions of a n-set are proposed and compared, together with a main existing one, namely 'partition-distance' D(.,.). The comparison achieves by checking their restriction to…

Fermi's Paradox is the contradiction between the fact that it would seem to be highly probable that there are other technologically advanced species beyond the Earth, and the fact that there is no generally accepted evidence for their…

Consider the problem of finding a population or a probability distribution amongst many with the largest mean when these means are unknown but population samples can be simulated or otherwise generated. Typically, by selecting largest…

Many hardness results in computational social choice make use of the fact that every directed graph may be induced as the pairwise majority relation of some preference profile. However, this fact requires a number of voters that is almost…

Consider an election where the set of candidates is partitioned into parties, and each party must choose exactly one candidate to nominate for the election held over all nominees. The Necessary President problem asks whether a candidate, if…

Voting is the aggregation of individual preferences in order to select a winning alternative. Selection of a winner is accomplished via a voting rule, e.g., rank-order voting, majority rule, plurality rule, approval voting. Which voting…

In a party-based election system, the voters are grouped into parties and all voters of a party are assumed to vote according to the party preferences over the candidates. Hence, once the party preferences are declared the outcome of the…

Policy learning algorithms are widely used in areas such as personalized medicine and advertising to develop individualized treatment regimes. However, most methods force a decision even when predictions are uncertain, which is risky in…

Given a finite set $S$ of points in $\mathbb{R}^d$, which we regard as the locations of voters on a $d$-dimensional political `spectrum', two candidates (Alice and Bob) select one point in $\mathbb{R}^d$ each, in an attempt to get as many…

Apportionment is the act of distributing the seats of a legislature among political parties (or states) in proportion to their vote shares (or populations). A famous impossibility by Balinski and Young (2001) shows that no apportionment…

When people pursue rewards in stochastic environments, they often match their choice frequencies to the observed target frequencies, even when this policy is demonstrably sub-optimal. We used a ``hide and seek'' task to evaluate this…

In approval-based budget division, a budget needs to be distributed to candidates based on the voters' approval ballots over these candidates. In the pursuit of a simple, consistent, and approximately fair rule for this setting, we…

Mechanism design is concerned with settings where a policymaker (or social planner) faces the problem of aggregating the announced preferences of multiple agents into a collective (or social), system-wide decision. One of the most important…

The Traitors is a social deduction game in which an informed minority of Traitors face an uninformed majority of Faithful, and the recurring question facing the Faithful is how to vote. Random voting is known to be optimal for the…

Casting machine learning as a type of search, we demonstrate that the proportion of problems that are favorable for a fixed algorithm is strictly bounded, such that no single algorithm can perform well over a large fraction of them. Our…

An important question in elections is the determine whether a candidate can be a winner when some votes are absent. We study this determining winner with the absent votes (WAV) problem when the votes are top-truncated. We show that the WAV…

Social networks are increasingly being used to conduct polls. We introduce a simple model of such social polling. We suppose agents vote sequentially, but the order in which agents choose to vote is not necessarily fixed. We also suppose…