Related papers: Deliberation Among Informed Citizens: The Value of…
Participatory budgeting is a democratic approach to deciding the funding of public projects, which has been adopted in many cities across the world. We present a survey of research on participatory budgeting emerging from the computational…
Background: Confirmation bias is the tendency to acquire or evaluate new information in a way that is consistent with one's preexisting beliefs. It is omnipresent in psychology, economics, and even scientific practices. Prior theoretical…
Deliberative processes are often discussed as increasing or decreasing polarization. This approach misses a different, and arguably more diagnostic, dimension of opinion change: whether deliberation reshuffles who agrees with whom, or…
Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a process in which voters decide how to allocate a common budget; most commonly it is done by ordinary people -- in particular, residents of some municipality -- to decide on a fraction of the municipal…
In a stylized voting model, we establish that increasing the share of critical thinkers -- individuals who are aware of the ambivalent nature of a certain issue -- in the population increases the efficiency of surveys (elections) but might…
Frequently we revise our first opinions after talking over with other individuals because we get convinced. Argumentation is a verbal and social process aimed at convincing. It includes conversation and persuasion. In this case, the…
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
We study an opinion dynamics model in which agents reach compromise via pairwise interactions. When the opinions of two agents are sufficiently close, they both acquire the average of their initial opinions; otherwise, they do not interact.…
The suggestions generated by most existing recommender systems are known to suffer from a lack of diversity, and other issues like popularity bias. As a result, they have been observed to promote well-known "blockbuster" items, and to…
Inferring from inconsistency and making decisions are two problems which have always been treated separately by researchers in Artificial Intelligence. Consequently, different models have been proposed for each category. Different…
Opinion dynamics is crucial for unraveling the complexities of human interaction in the information age. How to speed up consensus without disturbing the fate of the system is key for opinion dynamics. We propose a voter model on adaptive…
Taking a pragmatic approach to the processes involved in the phenomena of collective opinion formation, we investigate two specific modifications to the co-evolving network voter model of opinion formation, studied by Holme and Newman [1].…
We study the voting problem with two alternatives where voters' preferences depend on a not-directly-observable state variable. While equilibria in the one-round voting mechanisms lead to a good decision, they are usually hard to compute…
We propose a framework for strategic voting when a voter may lack knowledge about the preferences of other voters, or about other voters' knowledge about her own preference. In this setting we define notions of manipulation, equilibrium,…
Online comments significantly influence users' judgments, yet their presentation, often determined by platform algorithms, can introduce biases, such as anchoring effects, which distort reasoning. While existing research emphasizes…
To make decisions we are guided by the evidence we collect, as well as the opinions of friends and neighbors. How do we integrate our private beliefs with information we obtain from our social network? To understand the strategies humans…
We study an outcome of a vote in a population of voters exposed to an externally applied bias in favour of one of two potential candidates. The population consists of ordinary individuals, that are in majority and tend to align their…
Information-communication technology promotes collaborative environments like Wikipedia where, however, controversiality and conflicts can appear. To describe the rise, persistence, and resolution of such conflicts we devise an extended…
In many social-choice mechanisms the resulting choice is not the most preferred one for some of the participants, thus the need for methods to justify the choice made in a way that improves the acceptance and satisfaction of said…
It is very common to observe crowds of individuals solving similar problems with similar information in a largely independent manner. We argue here that crowds can become "smarter," i.e., more efficient and robust, by partially following…