Related papers: Beyond the worst case: Distortion in impartial cul…

We study the following metric distortion problem: there are two finite sets of points, $V$ and $C$, that lie in the same metric space, and our goal is to choose a point in $C$ whose total distance from the points in $V$ is as small as…

For centuries, it has been widely believed that the influence of a small coalition of voters is negligible in a large election. Consequently, there is a large body of literature on characterizing the likelihood for an election to be…

Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…

This study investigates adversarial attacks conducted to distort voter model dynamics in complex networks. Specifically, a simple adversarial attack method is proposed to hold the state of opinions of an individual closer to the target…

We study the contrarian voter model for opinion formation in a society under the influence of an external oscillating propaganda and stochastic noise. Each agent of the population can hold one of two possible opinions on a given issue…

Integrity of elections is vital to democratic systems, but it is frequently threatened by malicious actors. The study of algorithmic complexity of the problem of manipulating election outcomes by changing its structural features is known as…

Systematic discriminatory biases present in our society influence the way data is collected and stored, the way variables are defined, and the way scientific findings are put into practice as policy. Automated decision procedures and…

There is a paradox in the model of social dynamics determined by voting in a stochastic environment (the ViSE model) called "pit of losses." It consists in the fact that a series of democratic decisions may systematically lead the society…

For a voting ensemble that selects an odd-sized subset of the ensemble classifiers at random for each example, applies them to the example, and returns the majority vote, we show that any number of voters may minimize the error rate over an…

We study vote delegation with "well-behaving" and "misbehaving" agents and compare it with conventional voting. Typical examples for vote delegation are validation or governance tasks on blockchains. There is a majority of well-behaving…

We study a generalized family of stochastic orders, semiparametrized by a distortion function H, namely H-distorted stochastic dominance, which may determine a continuum of dominance relations from the first- to the second-order stochastic…

We study multiwinner elections with approval-based preferences. An instance of a multiwinner election consists of a set of alternatives, a population of voters---each voter approves a subset of alternatives, and the desired committee size…

Voter control problems model situations such as an external agent trying to affect the result of an election by adding voters, for example by convincing some voters to vote who would otherwise not attend the election. Traditionally, voters…

In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting. Moreover, scenarios such as committee or board elections require voting rules that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent may vote…

Classical voting rules assume that ballots are complete preference orders over candidates. However, when the number of candidates is large enough, it is too costly to ask the voters to rank all candidates. We suggest to fix a rank k, to ask…

There are many situations in which mis-coordinated strategic voting can leave strategic voters worse off than they would have been had they not tried to strategize. We analyse the simplest of such scenarios, in which the set of strategic…

In this note, we uncover three connections between the metric distortion problem and voting methods and axioms from the social choice literature.

There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…

In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…

An electoral spoiler is usually defined as a losing candidate whose removal would affect the outcome by changing the winner. So far, spoiler effects have been analyzed primarily for single-winner electoral systems. We consider this subject…