Related papers: From a toy model to the double square root voting …

We propose a stochastic model of opinion exchange in networks. A finite set of agents is organized in a fixed network structure. There is a binary state of the world and each agent receives a private signal on the state. We model beliefs as…

We consider a social choice problem where only a small number of people out of a large population are sufficiently available or motivated to vote. A common solution to increase participation is to allow voters use a proxy, that is, transfer…

The voter model with the node update rule is numerically investigated on a directed network. We start from a directed hierarchical tree, and split and rewire each incoming arc at the probability $p$. In order to discriminate the better and…

We consider collective decision making when the society consists of groups endowed with voting weights. Each group chooses an internal rule that specifies the allocation of its weight to the alternatives as a function of its members'…

This paper studies the allocation of voting weights in a committee representing groups of different sizes. We introduce a partial ordering of weight allocations based on stochastic comparison of social welfare. We show that when the number…

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…

Voting algorithms have been widely used as consensus protocols in the realization of fault-tolerant systems. These algorithms are best suited for distributed systems of nodes with low computational power or heterogeneous networks, where…

We introduce the heterogeneous voter model (HVM), in which each agent has its own intrinsic rate to change state, reflective of the heterogeneity of real people, and the partisan voter model (PVM), in which each agent has an innate and…

In the United States electoral system, a candidate is elected indirectly by winning a majority of electoral votes cast by individual states, the election usually being decided by the votes cast by a small number of "swing states" where the…

We study a class of elections in which the input format is trichotomous and allows voters to elicit their negative feelings explicitly. In particular, we study multiwinner elections with a special proclivity to elect proportionally…

We introduce Flexible Representative Democracy (FRD), a novel hybrid of Representative Democracy (RD) and Direct Democracy (DD) in which voters can alter the issue-dependent weights of a set of elected representatives. In line with the…

Sortition is based on the idea of choosing randomly selected representatives for decision making. The main properties that make sortition particularly appealing are fairness -- all the citizens can be selected with the same probability --…

For a voting ensemble that selects an odd-sized subset of the ensemble classifiers at random for each example, applies them to the example, and returns the majority vote, we show that any number of voters may minimize the error rate over an…

We investigate an iterative deliberation process for an agent community wishing to make a joint decision. We develop a general model consisting of a community of n agents, each with their initial ideal point in some metric space (X, d),…

We design a recursive measure of voting power based on partial as well as full voting efficacy. Classical measures, by contrast, incorporate solely full efficacy. We motivate our design by representing voting games using a division lattice…

In this paper, we consider lightweight decentralised algorithms for achieving consensus in distributed systems. Each member of a distributed group has a private value from a fixed set consisting of, say, two elements, and the goal is for…

The only acceptable form of polling in the multi-billion dollar survey research field utilizes representative samples. We argue that with proper statistical adjustment, non-representative polling can provide accurate predictions, and often…

The problem of how to allocate to states the seats in the US House of Representatives is the most studied instance of what is termed the `apportionment problem'. We propose a new method of apportionment which is stochastic, which meets the…

A population of voters must elect representatives among themselves to decide on a sequence of possibly unforeseen binary issues. Voters care only about the final decision, not the elected representatives. The disutility of a voter is…

This paper studies power indices based on average representations of a weighted game. If restricted to account for the lack of power of dummy voters, average representations become coherent measures of voting power, with power distributions…