Related papers: Distortion Under Public-Spirited Voting
Participatory budgeting is a democratic innovation that empowers citizens to propose and vote on public investment projects. While researchers in computer science focused on improving the voting phase of this process, in this work we aim to…
During deliberation processes, mediators and facilitators typically need to select a small and representative set of opinions later used to produce digestible reports for stakeholders. In online deliberation platforms, algorithmic selection…
A most debated topic of the last years is whether simple statistical physics models can explain collective features of social dynamics. A necessary step in this line of endeavour is to find regularities in data referring to large scale…
We study how office-seeking parties use direct democracy to shape elections. A party with a strong electoral base can benefit from using a binding referendum to resolve issues that divide its core supporters. When referendums do not bind,…
We prove that every Condorcet-consistent voting rule can be manipulated by a voter who completely reverses their preference ranking, assuming that there are at least 4 alternatives. This corrects an error and improves a result of [Sanver,…
The voter model is a paradigm of ordering dynamics. At each time step, a random node is selected and copies the state of one of its neighbors. Traditionally, this state has been considered as a binary variable. Here, we relax this…
Social dynamics determined by voting in a stochastic environment is analyzed for a society composed of two cohesive groups of similar size. Within the model of random walks determined by voting, explicit formulas are derived for the capital…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic paradigm whereby voters decide on a set of projects to fund with a limited budget. We consider PB in a setting where voters report ordinal preferences over projects and have (possibly) asymmetric…
Within the ViSE (Voting in Stochastic Environment) model, we study the effectiveness of majority voting in various environments. As shown by the pit-of-losses paradox identified in previous work, majority decisions in apparently hostile…
Voting in multi-issue domains allows for compromise outcomes that satisfy all voters to some extent, but such fairness considerations open the possibility of a special form of manipulation: free-riding, where voters untruthfully oppose a…
Social consensus is important for society. Sometimes the success of society depends on a consensus (e.g. the decision to pay taxes or to commit to the constitution). Examples for continuous opinion dynamics are discussions about tax rates…
Crowdsourcing systems aggregate decisions of many people to help users quickly identify high-quality options, such as the best answers to questions or interesting news stories. A long-standing issue in crowdsourcing is how option quality…
We extend the recently introduced framework of metric distortion to multiwinner voting. In this framework, $n$ agents and $m$ alternatives are located in an underlying metric space. The exact distances between agents and alternatives are…
The legitimacy of bottom-up democratic processes for the distribution of public funds by policy-makers is challenging and complex. Participatory budgeting is such a process, where voting outcomes may not always be fair or inclusive.…
We propose an agent-based model of collective opinion formation to study the wisdom of crowds under social influence. The opinion of an agent is a continuous positive value, denoting its subjective answer to a factual question. The wisdom…
We address the question of aggregating the preferences of voters in the context of participatory budgeting. We scrutinize the voting method currently used in practice, underline its drawbacks, and introduce a novel scheme tailored to this…
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…
We consider the problem of predicting winners in elections, for the case where we are given complete knowledge about all possible candidates, all possible voters (together with their preferences), but where it is uncertain either which…
Voting rules may implement the will of the society when all eligible voters vote, and only them. However, they may fail to do so when sybil (fake or duplicate) votes are present and when only some honest (non sybil) voters actively…
Multiwinner voting rules are used to select a small representative subset of candidates or items from a larger set given the preferences of voters. However, if candidates have sensitive attributes such as gender or ethnicity (when selecting…