Related papers: No Midcost Democracy
A critical issue for society today is the emergence and decline of democracy worldwide. It is unclear, however, how democratic features, such as elections and civil liberties, influence this change. Democracy indices, which are the standard…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
Committee decisions are complicated by a deadline, e.g., the next start of a budget, or the beginning of a semester. In committee hiring decisions, it may be that if no candidate is supported by a strong majority, the default is to hire no…
In this paper, we rigorously study the problem of cost optimisation of hybrid (mixed) institutional incentives, which are a plan of actions involving the use of reward and punishment by an external decision-maker, for maximising the level…
In the metric distortion problem, a set of voters and candidates lie in a common metric space, and a committee of $k$ candidates must be elected. The objective is to minimize a social cost, defined as a function of the distances between…
Classical monetary systems regularly subject the most vulnerable majority of the world's population to debilitating financial shocks, and have manifestly allowed uncontrolled global inequality over the long term. Given these basic failures,…
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 paper studies information markets concerning single events from an epistemic social choice perspective. Within the classical Condorcet error model for collective binary decisions, we establish equivalence results between elections and…
Postselection is the process of discarding outcomes from statistical trials that are not the event one desires. Postselection can be useful in many applications where the cost of getting the wrong event is implicitly high. However, unless…
Iterative voting is a natural model of repeated strategic decision-making in social choice theory when agents have the opportunity to update their votes prior to finalizing the group decision. Prior work has analyzed the efficacy of…
We initiate the study of voting rules for participatory budgeting using the so-called epistemic approach, where one interprets votes as noisy reflections of some ground truth regarding the objectively best set of projects to fund. Using…
Winner selection by majority, in an election between two candidates, is the only rule compatible with democratic principles. Instead, when the candidates are three or more and the voters rank candidates in order of preference, there are no…
There is a growing body of work on sorting and selection in models other than the unit-cost comparison model. This work is the first treatment of a natural stochastic variant of the problem where the cost of comparing two elements is a…
This paper revisits the limitations of the Median Voter Theorem and introduces a novel framework to analyze the optimal economic ideological positions of political parties. By incorporating Nash equilibrium, we examine the mechanisms and…
The outcomes of democratic elections rest on individuals' decision-making that is driven by their varying preferences and beliefs. Individuals may prefer consensus to gridlock, or gridlock to consensus, and information may be fractured via…
Selecting representatives based on voters' preferences is a fundamental problem in social choice theory. While cardinal utility functions offer a detailed representation of preferences, ordinal rankings are often the only available…
In an indivisible participatory budgeting (PB) framework, we have a limited budget that is to be distributed among a set of projects, by aggregating the preferences of voters for the projects. All the prior work on indivisible PB assumes…
Participatory budgeting is one of the exciting developments in deliberative grassroots democracy. We concentrate on approval elections and propose proportional representation axioms in participatory budgeting, by generalizing relevant…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic paradigm whereby voters decide on a set of projects to fund with a limited budget. We consider PB in a setting where voters report ordinal preferences over projects and have (possibly) asymmetric…
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…