Related papers: Majority voting is not good for heaven or hell, wi…
Different types of dynamics have been studied in repeated game play, and one of them which has received much attention recently consists of those based on "no-regret" algorithms from the area of machine learning. It is known that dynamics…
We study the minority-opinion dynamics over a fully-connected network of $n$ nodes with binary opinions. Upon activation, a node receives a sample of opinions from a limited number of neighbors chosen uniformly at random. Each activated…
A population of voters must elect representatives among themselves to decide on a sequence of possibly unforeseen binary issues. Voters care only about the final decision, not the elected representatives. The disutility of a voter is…
The two most common types of electoral systems (ES) used in electing national legislatures are proportional representation and plurality voting. When they are evaluated, most often the arguments come from social choice theory and political…
We present an alternative voting system that aims at bridging the gap between proportional representative systems and majoritarian, single winner election systems. The system lets people vote for multiple parties, but then assigns each…
Institutions play a critical role in enabling communities to manage common-pool resources and avert tragedies of the commons. However, a fundamental issue arises: Individuals typically perceive participation as advantageous only after an…
Mechanism design is concerned with settings where a policymaker (or social planner) faces the problem of aggregating the announced preferences of multiple agents into a collective (or social), system-wide decision. One of the most important…
A major challenge in data-driven decision-making is accurate policy evaluation-i.e., guaranteeing that a learned decision-making policy achieves the promised benefits. A popular strategy is model-based policy evaluation, which estimates a…
Apportionment is the act of distributing the seats of a legislature among political parties (or states) in proportion to their vote shares (or populations). A famous impossibility by Balinski and Young (2001) shows that no apportionment…
Many mechanisms behind the evolution of cooperation, such as reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, and altruistic punishment, require group knowledge of individual actions. But what keeps people cooperating when no one is looking? Conformist…
A most debated topic of the last years is whether simple statistical physics models can explain collective features of social dynamics. A necessary step in this line of endeavour is to find regularities in data referring to large scale…
Individuals in free societies frequently exhibit striking coordination when making independent decisions en masse. Examples include the regular appearance of hit products or memes with substantially higher popularity compared to their…
Background: It has repeatedly been reported that when making decisions under uncertainty, groups outperform individuals. In a lab setting, real groups are often replaced by simulated groups: Instead of performing an actual group discussion,…
We investigate the distribution of partisanship in a cross-section of ten diverse States to elucidate how votes translate into seats won and other metrics. Markov chain simulations taking into account partisanship distribution agree…
This study proposes a new efficiency requirement, a minimal almost weak Pareto principle, which says that x is socially better than y whenever the only one individual never prefers y to x, and all the others prefers x to y. Then, I show…
We study the committee selection problem in the canonical impartial culture model with a large number of voters and an even larger candidate set. Here, each voter independently reports a uniformly random preference order over the…
We present theoretical and empirical results demonstrating the usefulness of voting rules for participatory democracies. We first give algorithms which efficiently elicit \epsilon-approximations to two prominent voting rules: the Borda rule…
A new model for the dynamics of opinion formation is proposed and analysed at the mean-field level. It can be regarded as a generalization of the noisy voter model in which agents update their binary states by copying others and by an…
The problem of making sequential decisions in unknown probabilistic environments is studied. In cycle $t$ action $y_t$ results in perception $x_t$ and reward $r_t$, where all quantities in general may depend on the complete history. The…
In an election campaign, candidates must decide how to optimally allocate their efforts/resources optimally among the regions of a country. As a result, the outcome of the election will depend on the players' strategies and the voters'…