Related papers: No Midcost Democracy
We consider manipulation problems when the manipulator only has partial information about the votes of the nonmanipulators. Such partial information is described by an information set, which is the set of profiles of the nonmanipulators…
Condorcet's jury theorem states that the correct outcome is reached in direct majority voting systems with sufficiently large electorates as long as each voter's independent probability of voting for that outcome is greater than 0.5. Yet,…
In voting theory, bribery is a form of manipulative behavior in which an external actor (the briber) offers to pay the voters to change their votes in order to get her preferred candidate elected. We investigate a model of bribery where the…
There is a class of models for pol/mil/econ bargaining and conflict that is loosely based on the Median Voter Theorem which has been used with great success for about 30 years. However, there are fundamental mathematical limitations to…
Agents vote to choose a fair mixture of public outcomes; each agent likes or dislikes each outcome. We discuss three outstanding voting rules. The Conditional Utilitarian rule, a variant of the random dictator, is Strategyproof and…
This paper studies average-cost Markov decision processes with semi-uniform Feller transition probabilities. This class of MDPs was recently introduced by the authors to study MDPs with incomplete information. This paper studies the…
We study a temporal voting model where voters have dynamic preferences over a set of public chores -- projects that benefit society, but impose individual costs on those affected by their implementation. We investigate the computational…
The problem of designing an optimal weighted voting system for the two-tier voting, applicable in the case of the Council of Ministers of the European Union (EU), is investigated. Various arguments in favour of the square root voting…
In this work we generalize standard Decision Theory by assuming that two outcomes can also be incomparable. Two motivating scenarios show how incomparability may be helpful to represent those situations where, due to lack of information,…
In light of the classic impossibility results of Arrow and Gibbard and Satterthwaite regarding voting with ordinal rules, there has been recent interest in characterizing how well common voting rules approximate the social optimum. In order…
A proposer requires the approval of a veto player to change a status quo. Preferences are single peaked. Proposer is uncertain about Vetoer's ideal point. We study Proposer's optimal mechanism without transfers. Vetoer is given a menu, or a…
This paper investigates third-degree price discrimination under endogenous market segmentation. Segmenting a market requires access to information about consumers, and this information comes with a cost. I explore the trade-offs between the…
Given the stated preferences of several people over a number of proposals regarding public policy initiatives, some of those proposals might be judged to be more ``divisive'' than others. When designing online participatory platforms to…
This work contributes to a foundational question in economic theory: how do individual-level cognitive biases interact with collective choice mechanisms? We study a setting where voters hold intrinsic preference rankings over a set of…
Election rules are formal processes that aggregate voters preferences, typically to select a single candidate, called the winner. Most of the election rules studied in the literature require the voters to rank the candidates from the most…
We investigate efficient ways for the incorporation of liquid democracy into election settings in which voters submit cumulative ballots, i.e., when each voter is assigned a virtual coin that she can then distribute as she wishes among the…
We study social choice rules under the utilitarian distortion framework, with an additional metric assumption on the agents' costs over the alternatives. In this approach, these costs are given by an underlying metric on the set of all…
We consider the notions of agreement, diversity, and polarization in ordinal elections (that is, in elections where voters rank the candidates). While (computational) social choice offers good measures of agreement between the voters, such…
This paper studies a large number of homogeneous Markov decision processes where the transition probabilities and costs are coupled in the empirical distribution of states (also called mean-field). The state of each process is not known to…
We generalize a binary majority-vote model on adaptive networks to its plurality-vote counterpart and analyze the time scale to consensus when voters are given more than two options. When opinions are uniformly distributed in the population…