Related papers: Responsibility Gap in Collective Decision Making
Liquid democracy is the principle of making collective decisions by letting agents transitively delegate their votes. Despite its significant appeal, it has become apparent that a weakness of liquid democracy is that a small subset of…
Autonomous AI agents now plan, decide, and act on behalf of users across healthcare, financial services, and workplace contexts, often without step-by-step human approval. Existing AI literacy frameworks were built for a world in which…
Institutions play a critical role in enabling communities to manage common-pool resources and avert tragedies of the commons. However, a fundamental issue arises: Individuals typically perceive participation as advantageous only after an…
In linear models of consensus dynamics, the state of the various agents converges to a value which is a convex combination of the agents' initial states. We call it democratic if in the large scale limit (number of agents going to infinity)…
We study collective decision-making in a model of human groups, with network interactions, performing two alternative choice tasks. We focus on the speed-accuracy tradeoff, i.e., the tradeoff between a quick decision and a reliable…
Democratic public life depends on institutions that make roles, responsibilities, relationships, and purposes intelligible as lived orientation. Contemporary AI systems are trained on web-scale corpora and aligned for helpfulness,…
Public confidence in democratic institutions has declined across many OECD countries over recent decades, while political participation and policy influence remain unevenly distributed across socioeconomic groups. Concurrently, democratic…
Causality is typically treated an all-or-nothing concept; either A is a cause of B or it is not. We extend the definition of causality introduced by Halpern and Pearl [2001] to take into account the degree of responsibility of A for B. For…
The ability to reason under uncertainty and with incomplete information is a fundamental requirement of decision support technology. In this paper we argue that the concentration on theoretical techniques for the evaluation and selection of…
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…
How do social animals make effective decisions in the absence of a leader? While coordination can improve accuracy, it also introduces delays as information propagates through the group. In changing environments, these delays can outweigh…
A key question concerning collective decisions is whether a social system can settle on the best available option when some members learn from others instead of evaluating the options on their own. This question is challenging to study, and…
Elections constitute a paradigm of decision-making problems that have puzzled experts of different disciplines for decades. We study two decision-making problems, where groups make decisions that impact only themselves as a group. In both…
A decision-maker faces uncertainty governed by a data-generating process (DGP), which is only known to belong to a set of sequences of independent but possibly non-identical distributions. A robust decision maximizes the expected payoff…
Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so (Galileo Galilei). According to the above sentence we do not ask why we need to measure democracy but if it is possible to measure something which is not unequivocally defined.…
Recursive reasoning systems alternate between acquiring new evidence and refining an accumulated understanding. Two design choices are typically left implicit: how to represent the evolving reasoning state, and when to stop iterating. This…
Social choice theory is the study of preference aggregation across a population, used both in mechanism design for human agents and in the democratic alignment of language models. In this study, we propose the representative social choice…
Everyday decisions often involve many different levels. What connects these higher and lower level decisions hierarchy to one another determines how the cause(s) of failures are interpreted. It is hypothesized that decision confidence…
Multi-agent LLM systems increasingly tackle complex reasoning, yet their interaction patterns remain limited to voting, unstructured debate, or pipeline orchestration. None model deliberation: a phased process where differentiated…
The study of fairness in intelligent decision systems has mostly ignored long-term influence on the underlying population. Yet fairness considerations (e.g. affirmative action) have often the implicit goal of achieving balance among groups…