Related papers: The Moderating Effect of Instant Runoff Voting
In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…
A core tension in the study of plurality elections is the clash between the classic Hotelling-Downs model, which predicts that two office-seeking candidates should position themselves at the median voter's policy, and the empirical…
Current electronic voting systems require an anonymous channel during the voting phase to prevent coercion. Typically, low-latency anonymization-networks like Tor are used for this purpose. In this paper we devise a monitoring attack that…
Implicit bias is the unconscious attribution of particular qualities (or lack thereof) to a member from a particular social group (e.g., defined by gender or race). Studies on implicit bias have shown that these unconscious stereotypes can…
Condorcet's jury theorem states that the correct outcome is reached in direct majority voting systems with sufficiently large electorates as long as each voter's independent probability of voting for that outcome is greater than 0.5. Yet,…
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…
Finding outlying elements in probability distributions can be a hard problem. Taking a real example from Voting Rights Act enforcement, we consider the problem of maximizing the number of simultaneous majority-minority districts in a…
We consider a two-round election model involving $m$ voters and $n$ candidates. Each voter is endowed with a strict preference list ranking the candidates. In the first round, the candidates are partitioned into two subsets, $A$ and $B$,…
I study an election between two ideologically polarized parties that are both office- and policy-motivated. The parties compete by proposing policies on a single issue. The analysis uncovers a non-monotonic relationship between ideological…
The symmetric exclusion process and the voter model are two interacting particle systems for which a dual finite particle system allows one to characterize its invariant measures. Adding spontaneous births and deaths to the two processes…
We investigate a variation of the classical voter model in which the set of influencing agents depends on an individual's current opinion. The initial population consists of a random sample of equally sized sub-populations for each state,…
The standard voting methods in the United States, plurality and ranked choice (or instant runoff) voting, are susceptible to significant voting failures. These flaws include Condorcet and majority failures as well as monotonicity and…
In traditional voter models, opinion dynamics are driven by interactions between individuals, where an individual adopts the opinion of a randomly chosen neighbor. However, these models often fail to capture the emergence of entirely new…
Opinion dynamics is crucial for unraveling the complexities of human interaction in the information age. How to speed up consensus without disturbing the fate of the system is key for opinion dynamics. We propose a voter model on adaptive…
Most social choice rules assume access to full rankings, while current alignment practice -- despite aiming for diversity -- typically treats voters as anonymous and comparisons as independent, effectively extracting only about one bit per…
Today, Internet involves many actors who are making revenues on it (operators, companies, service providers,...). It is therefore important to be able to make fair decisions in this large-scale and highly competitive economical ecosystem.…
In this paper, we study liquid democracy, a collective decision making paradigm which lies between direct and representative democracy. One main feature of liquid democracy is that voters can delegate their votes in a transitive manner so…
Modeling crowds has many important applications in games and computer animation. Inspired by the emergent following effect in real-life crowd scenarios, in this work, we develop a method for implicitly grouping moving agents. We achieve…
The property of proportional representation in approval-based committee elections has appeared in the social choice literature for over a century, and is typically understood as avoiding the underrepresentation of minorities. However, we…
With the emergence of precision medicine, estimating optimal individualized decision rules (IDRs) has attracted tremendous attention in many scientific areas. Most existing literature has focused on finding optimal IDRs that can maximize…