Related papers: Average-Case Analysis of Iterative Voting
We study group decision making with changing preferences as a Markov Decision Process. We are motivated by the increasing prevalence of automated decision-making systems when making choices for groups of people over time. Our main…
Agents care not only about the outcomes of collective decisions but also about how decisions are made. In many cases, both the outcome and the procedure affect whether agents see a decision as legitimate, justifiable, or acceptable. We…
Despite the prevalence of voting systems in the real world there is no consensus among researchers of how people vote strategically, even in simple voting settings. This paper addresses this gap by comparing different approaches that have…
We study the design of voting mechanisms in a binary social choice environment where agents' cardinal valuations are independent but not necessarily identically distributed. The mechanism must be anonymous -- the outcome is invariant to…
Most social choice rules assume access to full rankings, while current alignment practice -- despite aiming for diversity -- typically treats voters as anonymous and comparisons as independent, effectively extracting only about one bit per…
Harsanyi (1955) showed that the only way to aggregate individual preferences into a social preference which satisfies certain desirable properties is ``utilitarianism'', whereby the social utility function is a weighted average of…
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
We consider multi-agent systems where agents' preferences are aggregated via sequential majority voting: each decision is taken by performing a sequence of pairwise comparisons where each comparison is a weighted majority vote among the…
While much of the rapidly growing literature on fair decision-making focuses on metrics for one-shot decisions, recent work has raised the intriguing possibility of designing sequential decision-making to positively impact long-term social…
Decades of research suggest that information exchange in groups and organizations can reliably improve judgment accuracy in tasks such as financial forecasting, market research, and medical decision-making. However, we show that improving…
This paper presents a semi-quantitative mathematical model of the changes over time in the statistical distribution of well-being of individuals in a society. The model predicts that when individuals overvalue the more socially conspicuous…
In many collective decision making situations, agents vote to choose an alternative that best represents the preferences of the group. Agents may manipulate the vote to achieve a better outcome by voting in a way that does not reflect their…
Sequential allocation is a simple and attractive mechanism for the allocation of indivisible goods. Agents take turns, according to a policy, to pick items. Sequential allocation is guaranteed to return an allocation which is efficient but…
Many societal decision problems lie in high-dimensional continuous spaces not amenable to the voting techniques common for their discrete or single-dimensional counterparts. These problems are typically discretized before running an…
It is well known that no reasonable voting rule is strategyproof. Moreover, the common Plurality rule is particularly prone to strategic behavior of the voters and empirical studies show that people often vote strategically in practice.…
AI systems are often used to make or contribute to important decisions in a growing range of applications, including criminal justice, hiring, and medicine. Since these decisions impact human lives, it is important that the AI systems act…
Social choice is the theory about collective decision towards social welfare starting from individual opinions, preferences, interests or welfare. The field of Computational Social Welfare is somewhat recent and it is gaining impact in the…
Motivated by the success of the serial dictatorship mechanism in social choice settings, we explore its usefulness in tackling various combinatorial optimization problems. We do so by considering an abstract model, in which a set of agents…
A broad current application of algorithms is in formal and quantitative measures of murky concepts -- like merit -- to make decisions. When people strategically respond to these sorts of evaluations in order to gain favorable decision…
Iterative peer grading activities may keep students engaged during in-class project presentations. Effective methods for collecting and aggregating peer assessment data are essential. Students tend to grade projects favorably. So, while…