Related papers: No Midcost Democracy
In the context of single-winner ranked-choice elections between $m$ candidates, we explore the tradeoff between two competing goals in every democratic system: the majority principle (maximizing the social welfare) and the minority…
In the framework of the three-party constrained voter model, where voters of two radical parties (A and B) interact with "centrists" (C and Cz), we study the competition between a persuasive majority and a committed minority. In this model,…
Selective contests can impair participants' overall welfare in overcompetitive environments, such as school admissions. This paper models the situation as an optimal contest design problem with binary actions, treating effort costs as…
In this paper, we study voting rules on the interval domain, where the alternatives are arranged according to an externally given strict total order and voters report intervals of this order to indicate the alternatives they support. For…
We analyse optimal voting weights in two-tier voting systems. In our model, the overall population (or union) is split in groups (or member states) of different sizes. The individuals comprising the overall population constitute the first…
Voting rules based on evaluation inputs rather than preference orders have been recently proposed, like majority judgement, range voting or approval voting. Traditionally, probabilistic analysis of voting rules supposes the use of…
In the context of nonlinear prices, the empirical evidence suggests that the consumers have cognitive biases represented in a limited understanding of nonlinear price structures, and they respond to some alternative perceptions of the…
What is the best compromise in a situation where different people value different things? The most commonly accepted method for answering this question -- in fields across the behavioral and social sciences, decision theory, philosophy, and…
Since Downs proposed that the act of voting is irrational in 1957, myriad models have been proposed to explain voting and account for observed turnout patterns. We propose a model in which partisans consider both the instrumental and…
There has been much recent work on multiwinner voting systems. However, sometimes a committee is highly structured, and if we want to vote for such a committee, our voting method should be more structured as well. We consider committees…
In computational social choice, the distortion of a voting rule quantifies the degree to which the rule overcomes limited preference information to select a socially desirable outcome. This concept has been investigated extensively, but…
We consider a distributed voting problem with a set of agents that are partitioned into disjoint groups and a set of obnoxious alternatives. Agents and alternatives are represented by points in a metric space. The goal is to compute the…
The electoral criterion of independence of irrelevant alternatives, or IIA, states that a voting system is unacceptable if it would choose a different winner if votes were recounted after one of the losers had dropped out. But IIA confuses…
We analyse strategic, complete information, sequential voting with ordinal preferences over the alternatives. We consider several voting mechanisms: plurality voting and approval voting with deterministic or uniform tie-breaking rules. We…
The paper considers a general model of electoral systems combining district-based elections with a compensatory mechanism in order to create any outcome between strictly majoritarian and purely proportional seat allocation. It contains vote…
Digital money can be implemented efficiently by avoiding consensus. However, no-consensus implementations have drawbacks, as they cannot support smart contracts, and (even more fundamentally) they cannot deal with conflicting transactions.…
We show that in a situation where individuals have a choice between a costly institute and a free institute to perform a collective action task, the existence of a participation cost promotes cooperation in the costly institute. Despite…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
Participatory budgeting refers to the practice of allocating public resources by collecting and aggregating individual preferences. Most existing studies in this field often assume an additive utility function, where each individual holds a…
Dealing with quadratic payments, marginal probability is usually considered ideally constant, maybe for the sake of initial simplicity. Considering the voting scenario depicted in "Quadratic Payments: A Primer" by Vitalik Buterin, firstly…