Related papers: Unlocking Democratic Efficiency: How Coordinated O…

We study situations where a group of voters need to take a collective decision over a number of public issues, with the goal of getting a result that reflects the voters' opinions in a proportional manner. Our focus is on interconnected…

Platforms for online civic participation rely heavily on methods for condensing thousands of comments into a relevant handful, based on whether participants agree or disagree with them. These methods should guarantee fair representation of…

The budget is the key means for effecting policy in democracies, yet its preparation is typically an excluding, opaque, and arcane process. We aim to rectify this by providing for the democratic creation of complete budgets --- for…

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…

Multiwinner voting rules can be used to select a fixed-size committee from a larger set of candidates. We consider approval-based committee rules, which allow voters to approve or disapprove candidates. In this setting, several voting rules…

Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…

Electing a committee of size k from m alternatives (k < m) is an interesting problem under the multi-winner voting rules. However, very few committee selection rules found in the literature consider the coalitional possibilities among the…

I study the optimal voting mechanism for a committee that must decide whether to enact or block a policy of unknown benefit. Information can come both from committee members who can acquire it at cost, and a strategic lobbyist who wishes…

A collective of identical agents in a multi-agent system often works together towards the common goal. In situations where no supervisor agents are present to make decisions for the group, these agents must achieve some consensus via…

The ability to measure the satisfaction of (groups of) voters is a crucial prerequisite for formulating proportionality axioms in approval-based participatory budgeting elections. Two common - but very different - ways to measure the…

We consider elections where the voters come one at a time, in a streaming fashion, and devise space-efficient algorithms which identify an approximate winning committee with respect to common multiwinner proportional representation voting…

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…

Humans judge each other's actions, which at least partly functions to detect and deter cheating and to enable helpfulness in an indirect reciprocity fashion. However, most forms of judging do not only concern the action itself, but also the…

Majority voting is one of the few black-box interventions that can improve a fixed stochastic predictor: repeated access can be cheaper than changing a high-capability model. Classical fixed-competence theory makes this intervention look…

This paper studies a class of consensus dynamics where the interactions between agents are affected by a time-varying unknown scaling factor. This situation is encountered in the control of robotic fleets over a wireless network or in…

Multi-winner approval voting selects a size-$k$ committee that aggregates voters' approval preferences over a set of alternatives. A central question is coalitional stability: No coalition should be able to pick a committee -- of size at…

We study settings in which agents with incomplete preferences need to make a collective decision. We focus on a process of majority dynamics where issues are addressed one at a time and undecided agents follow the opinion of the majority.…

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…

Though voting-based consensus algorithms in Blockchain outperform proof-based ones in energy- and transaction-efficiency, they are prone to incur wrong elections and bribery elections. The former originates from the uncertainties of…

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process for allocating funds to projects based on the votes of members of the community. Different rules have been used to aggregate participants' votes. Past research has studied the trade-off…