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The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…
While autonomous agents often surpass humans in their ability to handle vast and complex data, their potential misalignment (i.e., lack of transparency regarding their true objective) has thus far hindered their use in critical applications…
We study the merging and the testing of opinions in the context of a prediction model. In the absence of incentive problems, opinions can be tested and rejected, regardless of whether or not data produces consensus among Bayesian agents. In…
Walsh [Wal10, Wal09], Davies et al. [DKNW10, DKNW11], and Narodytska et al. [NWX11] studied various voting systems empirically and showed that they can often be manipulated effectively, despite their manipulation problems being NP-hard.…
We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…
Voter control problems model situations in which an external agent tries toaffect the result of an election by adding or deleting the fewest number of voters. The goal of the agent is to make a specific candidate either win…
Most modern control systems are switched, meaning they have continuous as well as discrete decision variables. Switched systems often have constraints called dwell-time constraints (e.g., cycling constraints in a heat pump) on the switching…
We explore a specific parametric example of a regime change game in which a policymaker defends the status quo against a continuum of atomistic agents who seek to overthrow it. At the start of the game, the policymaker can initiate a policy…
In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…
Control systems can show robustness to many events, like disturbances and model inaccuracies. It is natural to speculate that they are also robust to sporadic deadline misses when implemented as digital tasks on an embedded platform. This…
We introduce preferential behavior into the study on statistical mechanics of money circulation. The computer simulation results show that the preferential behavior can lead to power laws on distributions over both holding time and amount…
We study the tradeoff between fundamental risk and time. A time-constrained agent has to solve a problem. She dynamically allocates effort between implementing a risky initial idea and exploring alternatives. Discovering an alternative…
We investigate feedback control of linear quantum systems subject to feedback-loop time delays. In particular, we examine the relation between the potentially achievable control performance and the time delays, and provide theoretical…
We conduct a laboratory experiment using framing to assess the willingness to ``sell a lemon'', i.e., to undertake an action that benefits self but hurts the other (the ``buyer''). We seek to disentangle the role of other-regarding…
Uncertainty principle forbids one to determine which of the two paths a quantum system has travelled, unless interference between the alternatives had been destroyed by a measuring device, e.g., by a pointer. One can try to weaken the…
The Political Compass Test (PCT) and similar surveys are commonly used to assess political bias in auto-regressive LLMs. Our rigorous statistical experiments show that while changes to standard generation parameters have minimal effect on…
Strategic manipulation of elections is typically studied in the context of promoting individual candidates. In parliamentary elections, however, the focus shifts: voters may care more about the overall governing coalition than the…
The main objective of this paper is to fill a critical gap in the literature by analyzing the effects of decentralization on the macroeconomic stability. A survey of the voluminous literature on decentralization suggests that the question…
It is difficult to neutrally evaluate the risks posed by large-scale leading-edge science experiments. Traditional risk assessment is problematic in this context for multiple reasons. Also, such experiments can be insulated from challenge…
In this paper, I characterize minimal stable voting rules and minimal self-stable constitutions (i.e., pairs of voting rules) for societies in which only power matters. To do so, I first let players' preference profiles over voting rules…