Related papers: An impossibility theorem concerning positive invol…
This paper proposes normative criteria for voting rules under uncertainty about individual preferences. The criteria emphasize the importance of responsiveness, i.e., the probability that the social outcome coincides with the realized…
In the apportionment problem, a fixed number of seats must be distributed among parties in proportion to the number of voters supporting each party. We study a generalization of this setting, in which voters can support multiple parties by…
Elections play a fundamental role in democratic societies, however they are often characterized by unexpected results. Here we discuss an election campaign model inspired by the compartmental epidemiology, and we show that the model…
This paper introduces the Voting with Random Proposers (VRP) procedure to address the challenges of agenda manipulation in voting. In each round of VRP, a randomly selected proposer suggests an alternative that is voted on against the…
Like many other voting systems, Majority Judgement suffers from the weaknesses of the underlying mathematical model: Elections as problem of choice or ranking. We show how the model can be enhanced to take into account the complete process…
Typical voting rules do not work well in settings with many candidates. If there are just several hundred candidates, then even a simple task such as choosing a top candidate becomes impractical. Motivated by the hope of developing group…
We present the core support criterion, a voting criterion satisfied by Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) that is analogous to the Condorcet criterion but reflective of a different majority rule philosophy. Condorcet methods can be thought of as…
In this paper, we propose how to use objective arguments grounded in statistical mechanics concepts in order to obtain a single number, obtained after aggregation, which would allow to rank "agents", "opinions", ..., all defined in a very…
A social decision rule (SDR) is any non-empty set-valued map that associates any profile of individual preferences with the set of (winning) alternatives. An SDR is Condorcet-consistent if it selects the set of Condorcet winners whenever…
We extend Berge's Maximum Theorem to allow for incomplete preferences. We first provide a simple version of the Maximum Theorem for convex feasible sets and a fixed preference. Then, we show that if, in addition to the traditional…
There is a class of models for pol/mil/econ bargaining and conflict that is loosely based on the Median Voter Theorem which has been used with great success for about 30 years. However, there are fundamental mathematical limitations to…
This paper investigates the problem of finding a preference relation on a set of acts from the knowledge of an ordering on events (subsets of states of the world) describing the decision-maker (DM)s uncertainty and an ordering of…
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…
We propose a simple method for combining together voting rules that performs a run-off between the different winners of each voting rule. We prove that this combinator has several good properties. For instance, even if just one of the base…
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…
Recently, Roger Colbeck and Renato Renner (C&R) have claimed that '[n]o extension of quantum theory can have improved predictive power'. If correct, this is a spectacular impossibility theorem for hidden variable theories, which is more…
We study the ability of a social media platform with a political agenda to influence voting outcomes. Our benchmark is Condorcet's jury theorem, which states that the likelihood of a correct decision under majority voting increases with the…
This paper introduces Propose or Vote (PoV), a democratic procedure for collective decision-making and elections that does not rely on a central mechanism designer. In the first stage, members of a polity choose whether to become…
The paper reviews some axioms of additivity concerning ranking methods used for generalized tournaments with possible missing values and multiple comparisons. It is shown that one of the most natural properties, called consistency, has…
We establish a link between multiwinner elections and apportionment problems by showing how approval-based multiwinner election rules can be interpreted as methods of apportionment. We consider several multiwinner rules and observe that…