Related papers: Geometric Comparisons of Electoral Rules Under Fee…
We present a unifying framework encompassing many social choice settings. Viewing each social choice setting as voting in a suitable metric space, we consider a general model of social choice over metric spaces, in which---similarly to the…
This article starts by introducing a new theoretical framework to model spatial systems which is obtained from the framework of interacting particle systems by replacing the traditional graphical structure that defines the network of…
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…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
We propose a computational framework for modeling opinion dynamics in electoral competitions that combines two realistic features: voter memory and exogenous shocks. The population is represented by a fully-connected network of agents, each…
There are many factors that can influence the outcome of an election. We here identify two dominant effects that can affect the votes obtained by a candidate, namely, the Majority Effect and the Media Effect. We mimic these two effects in a…
Condorcet's paradox is a fundamental result in social choice theory which states that there exist elections in which, no matter which candidate wins, a majority of voters prefer a different candidate. In fact, even if we can select any $k$…
An alternative voting scheme is proposed to fill the democratic gap between a president elected democratically via universal suffrage (deterministic outcome, the actual majority decides), and a president elected by one person randomly…
We investigate the coarsening dynamics of a simplified version of the persistent voter model in which an agent can become a zealot -- i.e. resistent to change opinion -- at each step, based on interactions with its nearest neighbors. We…
Changes in political geography and electoral district boundaries shape representation in the United States Congress. To disentangle the effects of geography and gerrymandering, we generate a large ensemble of alternative redistricting plans…
We present theoretical and empirical results demonstrating the usefulness of voting rules for participatory democracies. We first give algorithms which efficiently elicit \epsilon-approximations to two prominent voting rules: the Borda rule…
An assembly of $n$ voters needs to decide on $t$ independent binary issues. Each voter has opinions about the issues, given by a $t$-bit vector. Anscombe's paradox shows that a policy following the majority opinion in each issue may not…
The paper considers the problem of a leader that seeks to optimally influence the opinions of agents in a directed network through connecting with a limited number of the agents ("direct followers"), possibly in the presence of a fixed…
We introduce a socially motivated extension of the voter model in which individual voters are also influenced by two opposing, fixed-opinion news sources. These sources forestall consensus and instead drive the population to a politically…
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…
When people pursue rewards in stochastic environments, they often match their choice frequencies to the observed target frequencies, even when this policy is demonstrably sub-optimal. We used a ``hide and seek'' task to evaluate this…
In populations with community structure, the formation of consensus requires both alignment within and diffusion of beliefs across groups, processes that evolve on distinct time scales. How do modularity, asymmetry, and polarization shape…
We consider a spatial voting model where both candidates and voters are positioned in the $d$-dimensional Euclidean space, and each voter ranks candidates based on their proximity to the voter's ideal point. We focus on the scenario where…
It is well known, by the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem, that when there are more than two candidates, any non-dictatorial voting rule can be manipulated by untruthful voters. But how strong is the incentive to manipulate under different…
This paper proposes normative criteria for voting rules under uncertainty about individual preferences. The criteria emphasize the importance of responsiveness, i.e., the probability that the social outcome coincides with the realized…