Related papers: Optimally Dictatorial Committees
What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good,…
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…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
The budget is the key means for effecting policy in democracies, yet its preparation is typically an excluding, opaque, and arcane process. We aim to rectify this by providing for the democratic creation of complete budgets --- for…
Much of the theoretical work on strategic voting makes strong assumptions about what voters know about the voting situation. A strategizing voter is typically assumed to know how other voters will vote and to know the rules of the voting…
A decision maker is choosing between an active action (e.g., purchase a house, invest certain stock) and a passive action. The payoff of the active action depends on the buyer's private type and also an unknown state of nature. An…
We examine vote delegation when preferences of agents are private information. One group of agents (delegators) does not want to participate in voting and abstains under conventional voting or can delegate its votes to the other group…
Altruistic lobbying is lobbying in the public interest or in the interest of the least protected part of the society. In fact, an altruist has a wide range of strategies, from behaving in the interest of the society as a whole to the…
The guarantee of an anonymous mechanism is the worst case welfare an agent can secure against unanimously adversarial others. How high can such a guarantee be, and what type of mechanism achieves it? We address the worst case design…
Proponents of participatory democracy praise Liquid Democracy: decisions are taken by referendum, but voters delegate their votes freely. When better informed voters are present, delegation can increase the probability of a correct…
The traditional axiomatic approach to voting is motivated by the problem of reconciling differences in subjective preferences. In contrast, a dominant line of work in the theory of voting over the past 15 years has considered a different…
This paper examines the optimal organizational rules that govern the process of dividing a fixed surplus. The process is modeled as a sequential multilateral bargaining game with costly recognition. The designer sets the voting rule --…
A voting center is in charge of collecting and aggregating voter preferences. In an iterative process, the center sends comparison queries to voters, requesting them to submit their preference between two items. Voters might discuss the…
Strategic voting, or manipulation, is the process by which a voter misrepresents his preferences in an attempt to elect an outcome that he considers preferable to the outcome under sincere voting. It is generally agreed that manipulation is…
Decisions in a shareholder meeting or a legislative committee are often modeled as a weighted game. Influence of a member is then measured by a power index. A large variety of different indices has been introduced in the literature. This…
In many institutional settings, $k$ items are selected with the goal of representing the underlying distribution of claims, opinions, or characteristics in a large population. We study environments with two adversarial parties whose…
The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…
Voting mechanisms are widely accepted and used methods for decentralized decision-making. Ensuring the acceptance of the voting mechanism's outcome is a crucial characteristic of robust voting systems. Consider this scenario: A group 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…
Models to mimic the transmission of information in financial markets are introduced. As an attempt to generate the demand process, we distinguish between dictatorship associations, where groups of agents rely on one of them to make…