Related papers: On Multi-Level Apportionment
Reaching some form of consensus is often necessary for autonomous agents that want to coordinate their actions or otherwise engage in joint activities. One way to reach a consensus is by aggregating individual information, such as…
We study situations where a group of voters need to take a collective decision over a number of public issues, with the goal of getting a result that reflects the voters' opinions in a proportional manner. Our focus is on interconnected…
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…
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…
We study the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods to groups of agents. Agents in the same group share the same set of goods even though they may have different preferences. Previous work has focused on unanimous fairness, in which…
Every representative democracy must specify a mechanism under which voters choose their representatives. The most common mechanism in the United States -- Winner takes all single-member districts -- both enables substantial partisan…
Team assembly is a problem that demands trade-offs between multiple fairness criteria and computational optimization. We focus on four criteria: (i) fair distribution of workloads within the team, (ii) fair distribution of skills and…
In many applications such as rationing medical care and supplies, university admissions, and the assignment of public housing, the decision of who receives an allocation can be justified by various normative criteria. Such settings have…
The Constitutionally mandated task of assigning Congressional seats to the various U.S. States proportional to their represented populations ("according to their numbers") has engendered much contention, but rather less consensus. Using the…
Concatenation hierarchies are classifications of regular languages. All such hierarchies are built through the same construction process: start from an initial class of languages and build new levels using two generic operations.…
How to elect the representatives in legislative bodies is a question that every modern democracy has to answer. This design task has to consider various elements so as to fulfill the citizens' expectations and contribute to the maintenance…
The voting process is formalized as a multistage voting model with successive alternative elimination. A finite number of agents vote for one of the alternatives each round subject to their preferences. If the number of votes given to the…
Social choice is replete with various settings including single-winner voting, multi-winner voting, probabilistic voting, multiple referenda, and public decision making. We study a general model of social choice called Sub-Committee Voting…
In the theory of voting, the Plurality rule for preferences that come in the form of linear orders selects the alternatives most frequently appearing in the first position of those orders, while the Anti-Plurality rule selects the…
The public goods game is a famous example illustrating the tragedy of the commons. In this game cooperating individuals contribute to a pool, which in turn is distributed to all members of the group, including defectors who reap the same…
In this paper we discuss the problems of modern representative democracy and we look at the selection of legislators by lot as a way to tame some of the drawbacks of that system. It is recalled at the beginning that resorting to sortition…
Sortition is the practice of delegating public decision-making to randomly selected panels. Recently, it has gained momentum worldwide through its use in citizens' assemblies, sparking growing interest within the computer science community.…
Many applications such as hiring and university admissions involve evaluation and selection of applicants. These tasks are fundamentally difficult, and require combining evidence from multiple different aspects (what we term "attributes").…
Consider an election where N seats are distributed among parties with proportions p_1,...,p_m of the votes. We study, for the common divisor and quota methods, the asymptotic distribution, and in particular the mean, of the seat excess of a…
Multi-winner voting is the process of selecting a fixed-size set of representative candidates based on voters' preferences. It occurs in applications ranging from politics (parliamentary elections) to the design of modern computer…