Related papers: Optimally Dictatorial Committees
A group of privately informed agents chooses between two alternatives. How should the decision rule be designed if agents are known to be biased in favor of one of the options? We address this question by considering the Condorcet Jury…
We present a new model that describes the process of electing a group of representatives (e.g., a parliament) for a group of voters. In this model, called the voting committee model, the elected group of representatives runs a number of…
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…
A set of agents has to make a decision about the provision of a public good and its financing. Agents have heterogeneous values for the public good and each agent's value is private information. An agenda-setter has the right to make a…
A population of voters must elect representatives among themselves to decide on a sequence of possibly unforeseen binary issues. Voters care only about the final decision, not the elected representatives. The disutility of a voter is…
We present a deliberation model where a group of individuals with heterogeneous preferences iteratively forms expert committees whose members are tasked with the updating of an exogenously given status quo change proposal. Every individual…
Which level of voting costs is optimal in a democracy? This paper argues that intermediate voting costs - what we term a "Midcost democracy" - should be avoided, as they fail to ensure that electoral outcomes reflect the preferences of the…
Are there voting methods which (i) give everyone, including minorities, an equal share of effective power even if voters act strategically, (ii) promote consensus rather than polarization and inequality, and (iii) do not favour the status…
We analyze the optimal delegation problem between a principal and an agent, assuming that the latter has state-independent preferences. We demonstrate that if the principal is more risk-averse than the agent toward non-status quo options,…
We consider an agent community wishing to decide on several binary issues by means of issue-by-issue majority voting. For each issue and each agent, one of the two options is better than the other. However, some of the agents may be…
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…
In certain parliamentary democracies, there are two major parties that move in and out of power every few elections, and a third minority party that essentially never governs. We present a simple model to account for this phenomenon, in…
We examine the following voting situation. A committee of $k$ people is to be formed from a pool of n candidates. The voters selecting the committee will submit a list of $j$ candidates that they would prefer to be on the committee. We…
We consider a committee voting on whether to adopt a reform under a quota rule, where members differ in how much they value the reform some supporting it, others opposing it. We examine how members can influence each other's votes through…
Direct democracy is a special case of an ensemble of classifiers, where every person (classifier) votes on every issue. This fails when the average voter competence (classifier accuracy) falls below 50%, which can happen in noisy settings…
We study the design of voting mechanisms in a binary social choice environment where agents' cardinal valuations are independent but not necessarily identically distributed. The mechanism must be anonymous -- the outcome is invariant to…
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…
The relationship of policy choice by majority voting and by maximization of utilitarian welfare has long been discussed. I consider choice between a status quo and a proposed policy when persons have interpersonally comparable cardinal…
We study how a principal should optimally choose between implementing a new policy and maintaining the status quo when information relevant for the decision is privately held by agents. Agents are strategic in revealing their information;…
In liquid democracy, agents can either vote directly or delegate their vote to a different agent of their choice. This results in a power structure in which certain agents possess more voting weight than others. As a result, it opens up…