Related papers: Majority voting is not good for heaven or hell, wi…

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…

Condorcet's paradox is a fundamental result in social choice theory which states that there exist elections in which, no matter which candidate wins, a majority of voters prefer a different candidate. In fact, even if we can select any $k$…

In this paper, I introduce a novel stability axiom for stochastic voting rules, called self-equivalence, by which a society considering whether to replace its voting rule using itself will choose not to do so. I then show that under the…

We consider collective decision making when the society consists of groups endowed with voting weights. Each group chooses an internal rule that specifies the allocation of its weight to the alternatives as a function of its members'…

Sustainable resource use in large societies requires social institutions that specify acceptable behavior and punish violators. Because mutual monitoring becomes prohibitively costly as populations grow, we examine whether sustainability…

Election data represent a precious source of information to study human behavior at a large scale. In proportional elections with open lists, the number of votes received by a candidate, rescaled by the average performance of all…

We investigate majority rule dynamics in a population with two classes of people, each with two opinion states $\pm 1$, and with tunable interactions between people in different classes. In an update, a randomly selected group adopts the…

We consider voting on multiple independent binary issues. In addition, a weighting vector for each voter defines how important they consider each issue. The most natural way to aggregate the votes into a single unified proposal is…

We study positional voting rules when candidates and voters are embedded in a common metric space, and cardinal preferences are naturally given by distances in the metric space. In a positional voting rule, each candidate receives a score…

A new game-theoretic approach for combining multiple classifiers is proposed. A short introduction in Game Theory and coalitions illustrate the way any collective decision scheme can be viewed as a competitive game of coalitions that are…

The proportional veto principle, which captures the idea that a candidate vetoed by a large group of voters should not be chosen, has been studied for ranked ballots in single-winner voting. We introduce a version of this principle for…

This paper offers a strategic rationale for zero-sum thinking in elections. We show that asymmetric information and distributional considerations together make voters wary of policies supported by others. This force impels a majority of…

We explore the design of an effective crowdsourcing system for an $M$-ary classification task. Crowd workers complete simple binary microtasks whose results are aggregated to give the final classification decision. We consider the scenario…

Collective decision-making is a process by which a group of individuals determines a shared outcome that shapes societal dynamics; from innovation diffusion to organizational choices. A common approach to model these processes is using…

Voting is a very general method of preference aggregation. A voting rule takes as input every voter's vote (typically, a ranking of the alternatives), and produces as output either just the winning alternative or a ranking of the…

We investigate a stochastic counterpart of majority votes over finite ensembles of classifiers, and study its generalization properties. While our approach holds for arbitrary distributions, we instantiate it with Dirichlet distributions:…

The Hot Stove Effect is a negativity bias resulting from the adaptive character of learning. The mechanism is that learning algorithms that pursue alternatives with positive estimated values, but avoid alternatives with negative estimated…

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…

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…

Metric distortion in social choice is a framework for evaluating how well voting rules minimize social cost when both voters and candidates exist in a shared metric space, with a voter's cost defined by their distance to a candidate. Voters…