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Proportional representation (PR) is a fundamental principle of many democracies world-wide which employ PR-based voting rules to elect their representatives. The normative properties of these voting rules however, are often only understood…
To choose a suitable multiwinner voting rule is a hard and ambiguous task. Depending on the context, it varies widely what constitutes the choice of an ``optimal'' subset of alternatives. In this paper, we provide a quantitative analysis of…
We consider a distributed voting problem with a set of agents that are partitioned into disjoint groups and a set of obnoxious alternatives. Agents and alternatives are represented by points in a metric space. The goal is to compute the…
People are commonly interested in predicting a statistical property of a random event such as mean and variance. Proper scoring rules assess the quality of predictions and require that the expected score gets uniquely maximized at the…
The voter model consists of a set of agents whose opinion is a binary variable. At each time step, an agent along with a social neighbor is selected and the agent imitates the social neighbor at the next time step. In this paper, we study a…
We design two mechanisms that ensure that the majority preferred option wins in all equilibria. The first one is a simultaneous game where agents choose other agents to cooperate with on top of the vote for an alternative, thus overcoming…
Voting is a very general method of preference aggregation. A voting rule takes as input every voter's vote (typically, a ranking of the alternatives), and produces as output either just the winning alternative or a ranking of the…
In approval-based multiwinner voting, voters express approval preferences over a set of candidates, and the goal is to return a winning committee. This model captures a broad range of subset selection problems under preferences. Prior work…
Binary yes-no decisions in a legislative committee or a shareholder meeting are commonly modeled as a weighted game. However, there are noteworthy exceptions. E.g., the voting rules of the European Council according to the Treaty of Lisbon…
We study a modification of the so-called Parrondo's paradox where a large number of individuals choose the game they want to play by voting. We show that it can be better for the players to vote randomly than to vote according to their own…
Accurate modeling of opinion dynamics has the potential to help us understand polarization and what makes effective political discourse possible or impossible. Here, we use physics-based methods to model the evolution of political opinions…
Proportional representation (PR) is one of the central principles in voting. Elegant rules with compelling PR axiomatic properties have the potential to be adopted for several important collective decision making settings. I survey some…
Voting is a commonly applied method for the aggregation of the preferences of multiple agents into a joint decision. If preferences are binary, i.e., "yes" and "no", every voting system can be described by a (monotone) Boolean function…
We develop a model of issue-specific voting behavior. This model can be used to explore lawmakers' personal voting patterns of voting by issue area, providing an exploratory window into how the language of the law is correlated with…
We study an urn process containing red and blue balls and two different strategies to reinforce the urn. Namely, a generalized P\'olya-type strategy versus an i.i.d. one. At each step, one of the two reinforcement strategies is chosen by…
Important decisions are likely made by groups of agents. Thus group decision making is very common in practice. Very transparent group aggregating rules are given by weighted voting, where each agent is assigned a weight. Here a proposal is…
There has been much recent work on multiwinner voting systems. However, sometimes a committee is highly structured, and if we want to vote for such a committee, our voting method should be more structured as well. We consider committees…
We study the statistics of turnout rates and results of the French elections since 1992. We find that the distribution of turnout rates across towns is surprisingly stable over time. The spatial correlation of the turnout rates, or of the…
Progress in theoretical physics is often made by the investigation of toy models, the model organisms of physics, which provide benchmarks for new methodologies. For complex systems, one such model is the adaptive voter model. Despite its…
We study positional voting rules when candidates and voters are embedded in a common metric space, and cardinal preferences are naturally given by distances in the metric space. In a positional voting rule, each candidate receives a score…