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Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) are expected to strengthen the public confidence in the correctness of an election outcome. We hypothesize that this is not always the case, in part because for large margins between the winner and the runner-up,…
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…
Corruption is an endemic societal problem with profound implications in the development of nations. In combating this issue, cross-national evidence supporting the effectiveness of the rule of law seems at odds with poorly realized outcomes…
Proponents of participatory democracy praise Liquid Democracy: decisions are taken by referendum, but voters delegate their votes freely. When better informed voters are present, delegation can increase the probability of a correct…
Governments are increasingly turning to algorithmic risk assessments when making important decisions, such as whether to release criminal defendants before trial. Policymakers assert that providing public servants with algorithmic advice…
Multi-winner approval elections are seen in a variety of settings ranging from academic societies and associations to public elections. In such elections, it is often the case that ballot-length restrictions are enforced; that is, where…
Despite many examples to the contrary, most models of elections assume that rules determining the winner will be followed. We present a model where elections are solely a public signal of the incumbent popularity, and citizens can protests…
Reasoning with LLMs increasingly unfolds inside a broader verification loop. Internally, systems use cheap checks, such as self-consistency or proxy rewards, which we call weak verification. Externally, users inspect outputs and steer the…
Political actors often manipulate redistricting plans to gain electoral advantages, a process known as gerrymandering. Several states have implemented institutional reforms to address this problem, such as establishing map-drawing…
What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good,…
Most scientific disciplines use significance testing to draw conclusions about experimental or observational data. This classical approach provides a theoretical guarantee for controlling the number of false positives across a set of…
We designed and ran an experiment to test how often people's choices are reversed by others' recommendations when facing different levels of confirmation and conformity pressures. In our experiment participants were first asked to provide…
Our infrastructure systems enable our well-being by allowing us to move, store, and transform materials and information given considerable social and environmental variation. Critically, this ability is shaped by the degree to which society…
Choice overload - in which larger choice sets are detrimental to a chooser's well-being - is potentially of great importance in the design of economic policy. Yet the current evidence on its prevalence is inconclusive. We argue that…
Strategic voting, or manipulation, is the process by which a voter misrepresents his preferences in an attempt to elect an outcome that he considers preferable to the outcome under sincere voting. It is generally agreed that manipulation is…
We examine an economy in which interactions are more productive if agents can trust others to refrain from cheating. Some agents are scoundrels, who cheat at every opportunity, while others cheat only if the cost of cheating, a decreasing…
We conduct an incentivized experiment on a nationally representative US sample \\ (N=708) to test whether people prefer to avoid ambiguity even when it means choosing dominated options. In contrast to the literature, we find that 55\% of…
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…
Political districts may be drawn to favor one group or political party over another, or gerrymandered. A number of measurements have been suggested as ways to detect and prevent such behavior. These measures give concrete axes along which…
An EPR experiment is studied where each particle within the entangled pair undergoes a few weak measurements (WMs) along some pre-set spin orientations, with the outcomes individually recorded. Then the particle undergoes one strong…