Related papers: Optimal Decision Mechanisms for Committees: Acquit…
The traditional axiomatic approach to voting is motivated by the problem of reconciling differences in subjective preferences. In contrast, a dominant line of work in the theory of voting over the past 15 years has considered a different…
I study the optimal voting mechanism for a committee that must decide whether to enact or block a policy of unknown benefit. Information can come both from committee members who can acquire it at cost, and a strategic lobbyist who wishes…
How to optimally persuade an agent who has a private type? When elicitation is feasible, this amounts to a fairly standard principal-agent-style mechanism design problem, where the persuader employs a mechanism to first elicit the agent's…
We consider an agent community wishing to decide on several binary issues by means of issue-by-issue majority voting. For each issue and each agent, one of the two options is better than the other. However, some of the agents may be…
In collective decision making, where a voting rule is used to take a collective decision among a group of agents, manipulation by one or more agents is usually considered negative behavior to be avoided, or at least to be made…
We design two mechanisms that ensure that the majority preferred option wins in all equilibria. The first one is a simultaneous game where agents choose other agents to cooperate with on top of the vote for an alternative, thus overcoming…
We consider settings where an uninformed principal must hear arguments from two better-informed agents, corresponding to two possible courses of action that they argue for. The arguments are verifiable in the sense that the true state of…
We present a new model that describes the process of electing a group of representatives (e.g., a parliament) for a group of voters. In this model, called the voting committee model, the elected group of representatives runs a number of…
We analyze the optimal delegation problem between a principal and an agent, assuming that the latter has state-independent preferences. We demonstrate that if the principal is more risk-averse than the agent toward non-status quo options,…
We study a model of consensus decision making, in which a finite group of Bayesian agents has to choose between one of two courses of action. Each member of the group has a private and independent signal at his or her disposal, giving some…
We study how to optimally design selection mechanisms, accounting for agents' investment incentives. A principal wishes to allocate a resource of homogeneous quality to a heterogeneous population of agents. The principal commits to a…
We consider an odd-sized "jury", which votes sequentially between two states of Nature (say A and B, or Innocent and Guilty) with the majority opinion determining the verdict. Jurors have private information in the form of a signal in…
We study a model of delegation in which a principal takes a multidimensional action and an agent has private information about a multidimensional state of the world. The principal can design any direct mechanism, including stochastic ones.…
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…
We study a scenario where an adjudication task (e.g., the resolution of a binary dispute) is outsourced to a set of agents who are appointed as jurors. This scenario is particularly relevant in a Web3 environment, where no verification of…
In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting. Moreover, scenarios such as committee or board elections require voting rules that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent may vote…
We characterize the optimal reward functions (scoring rules) that incentivize an agent to acquire information and report it truthfully to the principal. The optimal scoring rules let the agent make a simple binary bet in single-dimensional…
Theoretical results underpinning the Wisdom of Crowds, such as the Condorcet Jury Theorem, point to substantial accuracy gains through aggregation of decisions or opinions, but the foundations of this theorem are routinely undermined in…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
We consider a principal agent project selection problem with asymmetric information. There are $N$ projects and the principal must select exactly one of them. Each project provides some profit to the principal and some payoff to the agent…