Related papers: Can ranked-choice voting elect the least popular c…
Proponents of Condorcet voting face the question of what to do in the rare case when no Condorcet winner exists. Recent work provides compelling arguments for the rule that should be applied in three-candidate elections, but already with…
An election is a pair $(C,V)$ of candidates and voters. Each vote is a ranking (permutation) of the candidates. An election is $d$-Euclidean if there is an embedding of both candidates and voters into $\mathbb{R}^d$ such that voter $v$…
We present some hardness results on finding the optimal policy for the static formulation of distributionally robust Markov decision processes. We construct problem instances such that when the considered policy class is Markovian and…
When each voter rates or ranks several candidates for a single office, a strong Condorcet winner (SCW) is one who beats all others in two-way races. Among 21 electoral systems examined, 18 will sometimes make candidate X the winner even if…
This paper presents a new estimator of the intercept of a linear regression model in cases where the outcome varaible is observed subject to a selection rule. The intercept is often in this context of inherent interest; for example, in a…
AWAIRE is one of two extant methods for conducting risk-limiting audits of instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections. In principle AWAIRE can audit IRV contests with any number of candidates, but the original implementation incurred memory and…
Participatory budgeting (PB) has attracted much attention in recent times due to its wide applicability in social choice settings. In this paper, we consider indivisible PB which involves allocating an available, limited budget to a set of…
We analyse strategic, complete information, sequential voting with ordinal preferences over the alternatives. We consider several voting mechanisms: plurality voting and approval voting with deterministic or uniform tie-breaking rules. We…
An agent choosing between various actions tends to take the one with the lowest cost. But this choice is arguably too rigid (not adaptive) to be useful in complex situations, e.g., where exploration-exploitation trade-off is relevant in…
In an election, we are given a set of voters, each having a preference list over a set of candidates, that are distributed on a social network. We consider a scenario where voters may change their preference lists as a consequence of the…
The aim of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is to infer an agent's preferences from observing their behaviour. Usually, preferences are modelled as a reward function, $R$, and behaviour is modelled as a policy, $\pi$. One of the central…
Arrow's celebrated Impossibility Theorem asserts that an election rule, or Social Welfare Function (SWF), between three or more candidates meeting a set of strict criteria cannot exist. Maskin suggests that Arrow's conditions for SWFs are…
We investigate two systems of fully proportional representation suggested by Chamberlin Courant and Monroe. Both systems assign a representative to each voter so that the "sum of misrepresentations" is minimized. The winner determination…
We analyze the winning coalitions that arise under Bloc voting when voters preferences are single-peaked. For small numbers of candidates and numbers of winners, we determine conditions under which candidates in winning coalitions are…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
We study the control complexity of fallback voting. Like manipulation and bribery, electoral control describes ways of changing the outcome of an election; unlike manipulation or bribery attempts, control actions---such as…
We study sincere-strategy preference-based approval voting (SP-AV), a system proposed by Brams and Sanver [Electoral Studies, 25(2):287-305, 2006], and here adjusted so as to coerce admissibility of the votes (rather than excluding…
The standard way to evaluate language models on subjective tasks is through pairwise comparisons: an annotator chooses the "better" of two responses to a prompt. Leaderboards aggregate these comparisons into a single Bradley-Terry (BT)…
We show how hidden interesting subelections can be discovered in ordinal elections. An interesting subelection consists of a reasonably large set of voters and a reasonably large set of candidates such that the former have a consistent…
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…