Related papers: Paradoxical Oddities in Two Multiwinner Elections …
The two envelopes paradox is discussed. By calculating the conditional probability, we arrive at a conditional expectations which differs from existing results.
We present a systematic study of Plurality elections with strategic voters who, in addition to having preferences over election winners, have secondary preferences, which govern their behavior when their vote cannot affect the election…
Democratic societies are built around the principle of free and fair elections, that each citizen's vote should count equal. National elections can be regarded as large-scale social experiments, where people are grouped into usually large…
The frog model starts with one active particle at the root of a graph and some number of dormant particles at all nonroot vertices. Active particles follow independent random paths, waking all inactive particles they encounter. We prove…
A method for studying exact properties of a class of {\it inhomogeneous} stochastic many-body systems is developed and presented in the framework of a voter model perturbed by the presence of a ``zealot'', an individual allowed to favour an…
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…
Elections for public offices in democratic nations are large-scale examples of collective decision-making. As a complex system with a multitude of interactions among agents, we can anticipate that universal macroscopic patterns could emerge…
Muchnik's paradox says that enumerable betting strategies are not always reducible to enumerable strategies whose bets are restricted to either even rounds or odd rounds. In other words, there are outcome sequences x where an effectively…
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…
Parrondo's paradox arises in sequences of games in which a winning expectation may be obtained by playing the games in a random order, even though each game in the sequence may be lost when played individually. We present a suitable version…
We study two-stage committee elections where voters have dynamic preferences over candidates; at each stage, a committee is chosen under a given voting rule. We are interested in identifying a winning committee for the second stage that…
Stochastic dominance is a crucial tool for the analysis of choice under risk. It is typically analyzed as a property of two gambles that are taken in isolation. We study how additional independent sources of risk (e.g. uninsurable labor…
We show how hidden interesting subelections can be discovered in ordinal elections. An interesting subelection consists of a reasonably large set of voters and a reasonably large set of candidates such that the former have a consistent…
The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is a system of preferential voting employed in multi-seat elections. Each vote cast by a voter is a (potentially partial) ranking over a set of candidates. No techniques currently exist for computing the…
In an election where $n$ voters rank $m$ candidates, a Condorcet winning set is a committee of $k$ candidates such that for any outside candidate, a majority of voters prefer some committee member. Condorcet's paradox shows that some…
Observational data about human behavior is often heterogeneous, i.e., generated by subgroups within the population under study that vary in size and behavior. Heterogeneity predisposes analysis to Simpson's paradox, whereby the trends…
Consider elections where the set of candidates is partitioned into parties, and each party must nominate exactly one candidate. The Possible President problem asks whether some candidate of a given party can become the winner of the…
Electoral fraud often manifests itself as statistical anomalies in election results, yet its extent can rarely be reliably confirmed by other evidence. Here we report the complete results of municipal elections in the town of Vlasikha near…
We develop a model of multiwinner elections that combines performance-based measures of the quality of the committee (such as, e.g., Borda scores of the committee members) with diversity constraints. Specifically, we assume that the…
The outcomes of democratic elections rest on individuals' decision-making that is driven by their varying preferences and beliefs. Individuals may prefer consensus to gridlock, or gridlock to consensus, and information may be fractured via…