Related papers: ODEs and Mandatory Voting
Proportional representation plays a crucial role in electoral systems. In ordinal elections, where voters rank candidates based on their preferences, the Single Transferable Vote (STV) is the most widely used proportional voting method. STV…
The capability to widely sample the state and action spaces is a key ingredient toward building effective reinforcement learning algorithms. The variational optimization principles exposed in this paper emphasize the importance of an…
Differential equations (DEs) are commonly used to describe dynamic systems evolving in one (ordinary differential equations or ODEs) or in more than one dimensions (partial differential equations or PDEs). In real data applications the…
A proposed measure of voting power should satisfy two conditions to be plausible: first, it must be conceptually justified, capturing the intuitive meaning of what voting power is; second, it must satisfy reasonable postulates. This paper…
When learning policies for real-world domains, two important questions arise: (i) how to efficiently use pre-collected off-policy, non-optimal behavior data; and (ii) how to mediate among different competing objectives and constraints. We…
In this paper we study several monotonicity axioms in approval-based multi-winner voting rules. We consider monotonicity with respect to the support received by the winners and also monotonicity in the size of the committee. Monotonicity…
Spatial voting models of legislators' preferences are used in political science to test theories about their voting behavior. These models posit that legislators' ideologies as well as the ideologies reflected in votes for and against a…
The computational study of elections generally assumes that the preferences of the electorate come in as a list of votes. Depending on the context, it may be much more natural to represent the list succinctly, as the distinct votes of the…
How can voters induce politicians to put forth more proximate (in terms of preference) as well as credible platforms (in terms of promise fulfillment) under repeated elections? Building on the work of Aragones et al. (2007), I study how…
The classic Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem says that every strategy-proof voting rule with at least three possible candidates must be dictatorial. Similar impossibility results hold even if we consider a weaker notion of strategy-proofness…
Roll call data are widely used to assess legislators' preferences and ideology, as well as test theories of legislative behavior. In particular, roll call data is often used to determine whether the revealed preferences of legislators are…
Previous explanations for the persistence of polarization of opinions have typically included modelling assumptions that predispose the possibility of polarization (i.e., assumptions allowing a pair of agents to drift apart in their opinion…
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…
{\em Distortion} is a well-established notion for quantifying the loss of social welfare that may occur in voting. As voting rules take as input only ordinal information, they are essentially forced to neglect the exact values the agents…
Voting rules based on evaluation inputs rather than preference orders have been recently proposed, like majority judgement, range voting or approval voting. Traditionally, probabilistic analysis of voting rules supposes the use of…
I study an election between two ideologically polarized parties that are both office- and policy-motivated. The parties compete by proposing policies on a single issue. The analysis uncovers a non-monotonic relationship between ideological…
Several rules for social choice are examined from a unifying point of view that looks at them as procedures for revising a system of degrees of belief in accordance with certain specified logical constraints. Belief is here a social…
Rankings are a fact of life. Whether or not one likes them, they exist and are influential. Within academia, and in computer science in particular, rankings not only capture our attention but also widely influence people who have a limited…
The indoctrination game is a complete-information contest over public opinion. The players exert costly effort to manifest their private opinions in public in order to control the discussion, so that the governing opinion is similar to…
Systems of indirect voting based on the principle of qualified majority can be analysed using the methods of game theory. In particular, this applies to the voting system in the Council of the European Union, which was recently a subject of…