Related papers: On the Difficulty of Measuring Divisiveness of Pro…
In rank aggregation, members of a population rank issues to decide which are collectively preferred. We focus instead on identifying divisive issues that express disagreements among the preferences of individuals. We analyse the properties…
Recent years have seen an increase in the use of online deliberation platforms (DPs). One of the main objectives of DPs is to enhance democratic participation, by allowing citizens to post, comment, and vote on policy proposals. But in what…
During deliberation processes, mediators and facilitators typically need to select a small and representative set of opinions later used to produce digestible reports for stakeholders. In online deliberation platforms, algorithmic selection…
We analyze the structure of the disagreement among a population of voters over a set of alternatives. Surveys typically ask either for pairwise comparisons, simple and intuitive for participants, or full rankings over alternatives,…
Emerging methods for participatory algorithm design have proposed collecting and aggregating individual stakeholder preferences to create algorithmic systems that account for those stakeholders' values. Using algorithmic student assignment…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
News recommenders help users to find relevant online content and have the potential to fulfill a crucial role in a democratic society, directing the scarce attention of citizens towards the information that is most important to them.…
Several rules for social choice are examined from a unifying point of view that looks at them as procedures for revising a system of degrees of belief in accordance with certain specified logical constraints. Belief is here a social…
The suggestions generated by most existing recommender systems are known to suffer from a lack of diversity, and other issues like popularity bias. As a result, they have been observed to promote well-known "blockbuster" items, and to…
This chapter reviews empirical evidence bearing on the design of online forums for deliberative civic engagement. Dimensions of design are defined for different aspects of the deliberation: its purpose, the target population, the…
Digital technologies can augment civic participation by facilitating the expression of detailed political preferences. Yet, digital participation efforts often rely on methods optimized for elections involving a few candidates. Here we…
In this paper we extend the principle of proportional representation to rankings. We consider the setting where alternatives need to be ranked based on approval preferences. In this setting, proportional representation requires that…
A rapidly increasing amount of human conversation occurs online. But divisiveness and conflict can fester in text-based interactions on social media platforms, in messaging apps, and on other digital forums. Such toxicity increases…
Divisiveness appears to be increasing in much of the world, leading to concern about political violence and a decreasing capacity to collaboratively address large-scale societal challenges. In this working paper we aim to articulate an…
The way that people make choices or exhibit preferences can be strongly affected by the set of available alternatives, often called the choice set. Furthermore, there are usually heterogeneous preferences, either at an individual level…
Inspired by e-participation systems, in this paper we propose a new model to represent human debates and methods to obtain collective conclusions from them. This model overcomes drawbacks of existing approaches by allowing users to…
Public discourse and opinions stem from multiple social groups. Each group has beliefs about a topic (such as vaccination, abortion, gay marriage, etc.), and opinions are exchanged and blended to produce consensus. A particular measure of…
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…
Public opinion polling is usually done by random sampling from the entire population, treating individual opinions as independent. In the real world, individuals' opinions are often correlated, e.g., among friends in a social network. In…
The adoption of automated, data-driven decision making in an ever expanding range of applications has raised concerns about its potential unfairness towards certain social groups. In this context, a number of recent studies have focused on…