Related papers: Utilitarian Distortion Under Probabilistic Voting
Consider elections where the set of candidates is partitioned into parties, and each party must nominate exactly one candidate. The Possible President problem asks whether some candidate of a given party can become the winner of the…
The Condorcet criterion (CC) is a classical and well-accepted criterion for voting. Unfortunately, it is incompatible with many other desiderata including participation (Par), half-way monotonicity (HM), Maskin monotonicity (MM), and…
In this note, we uncover three connections between the metric distortion problem and voting methods and axioms from the social choice literature.
Variational inference has become one of the most widely used methods in latent variable modeling. In its basic form, variational inference employs a fully factorized variational distribution and minimizes its KL divergence to the posterior.…
In this paper we examine a variant of the voter model on a dynamically changing network where agents have the option of changing their friends rather than changing their opinions. We analyse, in the context of dense random graphs, two…
Much research in electoral control -- one of the most studied form of electoral attacks, in which an entity running an election alters the structure of that election to yield a preferred outcome -- has focused on giving decision complexity…
Data-driven decision making plays an important role even in high stakes settings like medicine and public policy. Learning optimal policies from observed data requires a careful formulation of the utility function whose expected value is…
A large amount of literature in social choice theory deals with quantifying the probability of certain election outcomes. One way of computing the probability of a specific voting situation under the Impartial Anonymous Culture assumption…
In collective decision making, where a voting rule is used to take a collective decision among a group of agents, manipulation by one or more agents is usually considered negative behavior to be avoided, or at least to be made…
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…
Two of the main factors shaping an individual's opinion are social coordination and personal preferences, or personal biases. To understand the role of those and that of the topology of the network of interactions, we study an extension of…
A differentially private selection algorithm outputs from a finite set the item that approximately maximizes a data-dependent quality function. The most widely adopted mechanisms tackling this task are the pioneering exponential mechanism…
We show that a necessary condition for eligibility of a candidate by the set of de Borda's voting rules in [H. Moulin (1988), Axioms of cooperative decision making] is not sufficient and we obtain a version of the criterion. Let $r(a_i)$ be…
Classical spatial models of two-party competition typically predict convergence to the median voter, yet real-world party systems often exhibit persistent and asymmetric polarization. We develop a spatial model of two-party competition in…
Multiwinner voting rules are used to select a small representative subset of candidates or items from a larger set given the preferences of voters. However, if candidates have sensitive attributes such as gender or ethnicity (when selecting…
We present the first calibration of quantum decision theory (QDT) to a dataset of binary risky choice. We quantitatively account for the fraction of choice reversals between two repetitions of the experiment, using a probabilistic choice…
The Coalitional Manipulation problem has been studied extensively in the literature for many voting rules. However, most studies have focused on the complete information setting, wherein the manipulators know the votes of the…
We consider the Persistent Voter model (PVM), a variant of the Voter model (VM) that includes transient, dynamically-induced zealots. Due to peer reinforcement, the internal confidence $\eta_i$ of a normal voter increases by steps of size…
The Courtade-Kumar conjecture posits that dictatorship functions maximize the mutual information between the function's output and a noisy version of its input over the Boolean hypercube. We present two significant advancements related to…
We study the ability of a social media platform with a political agenda to influence voting outcomes. Our benchmark is Condorcet's jury theorem, which states that the likelihood of a correct decision under majority voting increases with the…