Related papers: Distortion Under Public-Spirited Voting

By the Gibbard--Satterthwaite theorem, every reasonable voting rule for three or more alternatives is susceptible to manipulation: there exist elections where one or more voters can change the election outcome in their favour by…

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…

In collective decision making, where a voting rule is used to take a collective decision among a group of agents, manipulation by one or more agents is usually considered negative behavior to be avoided, or at least to be made…

Despite the prevalence of voting systems in the real world there is no consensus among researchers of how people vote strategically, even in simple voting settings. This paper addresses this gap by comparing different approaches that have…

The utilitarian distortion framework evaluates voting rules by their worst-case efficiency loss when voters have cardinal utilities but express only ordinal rankings. Under the classical model, a longstanding tension exists: Plurality,…

In the single winner determination problem, we have n voters and m candidates and each voter j incurs a cost c(i, j) if candidate i is chosen. Our objective is to choose a candidate that minimizes the expected total cost incurred by the…

Proportional representation (PR) is a fundamental principle of many democracies world-wide which employ PR-based voting rules to elect their representatives. The normative properties of these voting rules however, are often only understood…

We introduce the confident voter model, in which each voter can be in one of two opinions and can additionally have two levels of commitment to an opinion --- confident and unsure. Upon interacting with an agent of a different opinion, a…

We study social choice rules under the utilitarian distortion framework, with an additional metric assumption on the agents' costs over the alternatives. In this approach, these costs are given by an underlying metric on the set of all…

Distortion-based analysis has established itself as a fruitful framework for comparing voting mechanisms. m voters and n candidates are jointly embedded in an (unknown) metric space, and the voters submit rankings of candidates by…

We study low sample complexity mechanisms in participatory budgeting (PB), where each voter votes for a preferred allocation of funds to various projects, subject to project costs and total spending constraints. We analyze the distortion…

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.…

Classical results in voting theory show that strategic manipulation by voters is inevitable if a voting rule simultaneously satisfy certain desirable properties. Motivated by this, we study the relevant question of how often a voting rule…

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…

We investigate the potential of deliberation to create consensus among fully-informed citizens. Our approach relies on two cognitive assumptions: i. citizens need a thinking frame (or perspective) to consider an issue; and ii. citizens…

This work contributes to a foundational question in economic theory: how do individual-level cognitive biases interact with collective choice mechanisms? We study a setting where voters hold intrinsic preference rankings over a set of…

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 notion of distortion in social choice problems has been defined to measure the loss in efficiency -- typically measured by the utilitarian social welfare, the sum of utilities of the participating agents -- due to having access only to…

We study elections where voters are faced with the challenge of expressing preferences over an extreme number of issues under consideration. This is largely motivated by emerging blockchain governance systems, which include voters with…

Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…