Related papers: Distributive Politics, Representation, and Redistr…

We study fairness in social influence maximization, whereby one seeks to select seeds that spread a given information throughout a network, ensuring balanced outreach among different communities (e.g. demographic groups). In the literature,…

The election control problem through social influence asks to find a set of nodes in a social network of voters to be the starters of a political campaign aiming at supporting a given target candidate. Voters reached by the campaign change…

The spatial organization of individuals and their interactions in communities are important factors known to preserve diversity in many complex systems. Inspired by metapopulation models from ecology, we study opinion formation using a…

Third political parties are influential in shaping American politics. In this work we study the spread of a third party ideology in a voting population where we assume that party members/activists are more influential in recruiting new…

In many practical scenarios, a population is divided into disjoint groups for better administration, e.g., electorates into political districts, employees into departments, students into school districts, and so on. However, grouping people…

Information diffusion on social networks has been described as a collective outcome of threshold behaviors in the framework of threshold models. However, since the existing models do not take into account individuals' optimization problem,…

We study the distributed facility location problem, where a set of agents with positions on the line of real numbers are partitioned into disjoint districts, and the goal is to choose a point to satisfy certain criteria, such as optimize an…

Election control considers the problem of an adversary who attempts to tamper with a voting process, in order to either ensure that their favored candidate wins (constructive control) or another candidate loses (destructive control). As…

Election results are determined by numerous social factors that affect the formation of opinion of the voters, including the network of interactions between them and the dynamics of opinion influence. In this work we study the result of…

Uncertainty persists over how and why some countries become democratic and others do not, or why some countries remain democratic and others 'backslide' toward autocracy. Furthermore, while scholars generally agree on the nature of…

In social dilemmas self-interested learning agents face the choice between the societal benefit of cooperation and the immediate reward of defection. Significant evidence exists on the benefits of assortment mechanisms such as partner…

In this work, we are interested on the analysis of competing marketing campaigns between an incumbent who dominates the market and a challenger who wants to enter the market. We are interested in (a) the simultaneous decision of how many…

Redistricting efforts have gathered contemporary attention in both popular and scholarly debates, particularly in the United States where efforts to redraw congressional districts to favor either of the two major parties in 12 states --…

The spread of ideas, behaviors, and technologies generally depends on feedback mechanisms operating across multiple scales. Previous studies have extensively examined pairwise transmission and local reinforcement. However, the role of…

Fairness in multiwinner elections is studied in varying contexts. For instance, diversity of candidates and representation of voters are both separately termed as being fair. A common denominator to ensure fairness across all such contexts…

Growth is a multi-layered phenomenon in human societies, composed of socioeconomic and demographic change at many different scales. Yet, standard macroeconomic indicators average over most of these processes, blurring the spatial and…

Opportunities, such as access to education or family background, shape income inequality by influencing the chances of economic success. Unequal opportunities create uncertainty about whether success is merit- or luck-based. We examine how…

A distinction in reasons and motives for choosing a particular political leader establishes the key difference between older and young democracy. The former is based on electoral history, while the latter is based on feelings and personal…

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…

The recent wave of attention to partisan gerrymandering has come with a push to refine or replace the laws that govern political redistricting around the country. A common element in several states' reform efforts has been the inclusion of…