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The model of population protocols provides a universal platform to study distributed processes driven by pairwise interactions of anonymous agents. While population protocols present an elegant and robust model for randomized distributed…
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…
This paper studies delegation in a model of discrete choice. In the delegation problem, an uninformed principal must consult an informed agent to make a decision. Both the agent and principal have preferences over the decided-upon action…
Panel studies typically suffer from attrition, which reduces sample size and can result in biased inferences. It is impossible to know whether or not the attrition causes bias from the observed panel data alone. Refreshment samples - new,…
The mathematical study of voting, social choice theory, has traditionally only been applicable to choices among a few predetermined alternatives, but not to open-ended decisions such as collectively selecting a textual statement. We…
Clustering is a fundamental unsupervised learning problem where a dataset is partitioned into clusters that consist of nearby points in a metric space. A recent variant, fair clustering, associates a color with each point representing its…
Background. Software Engineering (SE) researchers extensively perform experiments with human subjects. Well-defined samples are required to ensure external validity. Samples are selected \textit{purposely} or by \textit{convenience},…
We consider the following problem in which a given number of items has to be chosen from a predefined set. Each item is described by a vector of attributes and for each attribute there is a desired distribution that the selected set should…
The aim of this paper is twofold. First, three theoretical principles are formalized: randomization, overrepresentation and restriction. We develop these principles and give a rationale for their use in choosing the sampling design in a…
The computational study of election problems generally focuses on questions related to the winner or set of winners of an election. But social preference functions such as Kemeny rule output a full ranking of the candidates (a consensus).…
A citizens' assembly is a group of people who are randomly selected to represent a larger population in a deliberation. While this approach has successfully strengthened democracy, it has certain limitations that suggest the need for…
Proponents of participatory democracy praise Liquid Democracy: decisions are taken by referendum, but voters delegate their votes freely. When better informed voters are present, delegation can increase the probability of a correct…
We propose a novel distribution-free scheme to solve optimization problems where the goal is to minimize the expected value of a cost function subject to probabilistic constraints. Unlike standard sampling-based methods, our idea consists…
Population protocols [Angluin et al., PODC, 2004] are a model of distributed computation in which indistinguishable, finite-state agents interact in pairs to decide if their initial configuration, i.e., the initial number of agents in each…
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…
We study higher statistical moments of Distortion for randomized social choice in a metric implicit utilitarian model. The Distortion of a social choice mechanism is the expected approximation factor with respect to the optimal utilitarian…
The aggregation of conflicting preferences is a central problem in multiagent systems. The key difficulty is that the agents may report their preferences insincerely. Mechanism design is the art of designing the rules of the game so that…
During deliberation processes, mediators and facilitators typically need to select a small and representative set of opinions later used to produce digestible reports for stakeholders. In online deliberation platforms, algorithmic selection…
The aggregation of conflicting preferences is a central problem in multiagent systems. The key difficulty is that the agents may report their preferences insincerely. Mechanism design is the art of designing the rules of the game so that…
Predicting the winner of an election is a favorite problem both for news media pundits and computational social choice theorists. Since it is often infeasible to elicit the preferences of all the voters in a typical prediction scenario, a…