Government By and For Millenial America: A Blueprint for 21st Century Government

Using this generation's unique ethos and commitment to pragmatic problem-solving, Millennials across the country have collaborated to design their vision for a 21st century democracy and reject the idea that our system is too broken, too stagnant, and too outdated. They have identified the parts of the system that need to be fixed while articulating what a true democracy should look like. Government By and For Millennial America, the third installment of our blueprint series, tackles some of the most fundamental, divisive, and difficult questions on the purpose of government in furthering our country's progress: how can we hear from more voices? How can we be more transparent? How can government be more egalitarian? How can we both support individual communities and the common good of every American? Most importantly, this pursuit is grounded in one fundamental idea that defines America's distinctive pursuit of self-governance: in the words of our namesake, Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country. - President Franklin D. Roosevelt We set out to craft a blueprint, and discovered, in conversations with over a thousand young people across the country, that the Millennial generation is not yet ready to give up on America's ever evolving experiment in a government by and for the people

The metric distortion of multiwinner voting

We extend the recently introduced framework of metric distortion to multiwinner voting. In this framework, n agents and m alternatives are located in an underlying metric space. The exact distances between agents and alternatives are unknown. Instead, each agent provides a ranking of the alternatives, ordered from the closest to the farthest. Typically, the goal is to select a single alternative that approximately minimizes the total distance from the agents, and the worst-case approximation ratio is termed distortion. In the case of multiwinner voting, the goal is to select a committee of k alternatives that (approximately) minimizes the total cost to all agents. We consider the scenario where the cost of an agent for a committee is her distance from the q-th closest alternative in the committee. We reveal a surprising trichotomy on the distortion of multiwinner voting rules in terms of k and q: The distortion is unbounded when q≤k/3, asymptotically linear in the number of agents when k/3k/

The distortion of distributed metric social choice

We consider a social choice setting with agents that are partitioned into disjoint groups, and have metric preferences over a set of alternatives. Our goal is to choose a single alternative aiming to optimize various objectives that are functions of the distances between agents and alternatives in the metric space, under the constraint that this choice must be made in a distributed way: The preferences of the agents within each group are first aggregated into a representative alternative for the group, and then these group representatives are aggregated into the final winner. Deciding the winner in such a way naturally leads to loss of efficiency, even when complete information about the metric space is available. We provide a series of (mostly tight) bounds on the distortion of distributed mechanisms for variations of well-known objectives, such as the (average) total cost and the maximum cost, and also for new objectives that are particularly appropriate for this distributed setting and have not been studied before

Vers des modes de scrutin moins manipulables

We study coalitional manipulation of voting systems: can a subset of voters, by voting strategically, elect a candidate they all prefer to the candidate who would have won if all voters had voted truthfully? From a theoretical point of view, we develop a formalism which makes it possible to study all voting systems, whether the ballots are orders of preference on the candidates (ordinal systems), ratings or approval values (cardinal systems), or even more general objects. We show that for almost all classical voting systems, their manipulability can be strictly reduced by adding a preliminary test aiming to elect the Condorcet winner if there is one. For the other voting systems, we define the generalized Condorcification which leads to similar results. Then we define the notion of decomposable culture, an assumption of which the probabilistic independence of voters is a special case. Under this assumption, we prove that, for each voting system, there exists a voting system which is ordinal, shares certain properties with the original voting system, and is at most as manipulable. Thus, the search for a voting system of minimal manipulability (in a class of reasonable systems) can be restricted to those which are ordinal and satisfy the Condorcet criterion. In order to allow everyone to examine these phenomena in practice, we present SVVAMP, a Python package of our own dedicated to the study of voting systems and their manipulability. Then we use it to compare the coalitional manipulability of various voting systems in several types of cultures, i.e. probabilistic models that generate populations of voters equipped with random preferences. We then complete the analysis with elections from real experiments. Finally, we determine the voting systems with minimal manipulability for very low values of the number of voters and of the number of candidates, and we compare them with the classical voting systems of the literature. In general, we establish that Borda's method, Range voting, and Approval voting are particularly manipulable. Conversely, we show the excellent resistance to manipulation of the system called IRV, also known as STV, and of its variant Condorcet-IRV.Nous étudions la manipulation par coalition des modes de scrutin: est-ce qu'un sous-ensemble des électeurs, en votant de façon stratégique, peut faire élire un candidat qu'ils préfèrent tous au candidat qui aurait été vainqueur si tous les électeurs avaient voté sincèrement? D'un point de vue théorique, nous développons un formalisme qui permet d'étudier tous les modes de scrutin, que les bulletins soient des ordres de préférences sur les candidats (systèmes ordinaux), des notes ou des valeurs d'approbation (systèmes cardinaux) ou des objets encore plus généraux. Nous montrons que pour la quasi-totalité des modes de scrutin classiques, on peut réduire strictement leur manipulabilité en ajoutant un test préliminaire visant à élire le vainqueur de Condorcet s'il en existe un. Pour les autres modes de scrutin, nous définissons la condorcification généralisée qui permet d'obtenir des résultats similaires. Puis nous définissons la notion de culture décomposable, une hypothèse dont l'indépendance probabiliste des électeurs est un cas particulier. Sous cette hypothèse, nous prouvons que, pour tout mode de scrutin, il existe un mode de scrutin qui est ordinal, qui partage certaines propriétés avec le mode de scrutin original et qui est au plus aussi manipulable. Ainsi, la recherche d'un mode de scrutin de manipulabilité minimale (dans une classe de systèmes raisonnables) peut être restreinte à ceux qui sont ordinaux et vérifient le critère de Condorcet. Afin de permettre à tous d'examiner ces phénomènes en pratique, nous présentons SVVAMP, un package Python de notre cru dédié à l'étude des modes de scrutin et de leur manipulabilité. Puis nous l'utilisons pour comparer la manipulabilité par coalition de divers modes de scrutin dans plusieurs types de cultures, c'est-à-dire des modèles probabilistes permettant de générer des populations d'électeurs munis de préférences aléatoires. Nous complétons ensuite l'analyse avec des élections issues d'expériences réelles. Enfin, nous déterminons les modes de scrutin de manipulabilité minimale pour de très faibles valeurs du nombre d'électeurs et du nombre de candidats et nous les comparons avec les modes de scrutin classiques. De manière générale, nous établissons que la méthode de Borda, le vote par notation et le vote par assentiment sont particulièrement manipulables. À l'inverse, nous montrons l'excellente résistance à la manipulation du système appelé VTI, également connu par son acronyme anglophone STV ou IRV, et de sa variante Condorcet-VTI

Four Puzzles in Information and Politics : Product Bans, Informed Voters, Social Insurance, & Persistent Disagreement

In four puzzling areas of information in politics, simple intuition and simple theory seem to conflict, muddling policy choices. This thesis elaborates theory to help resolve these conflicts. The puzzle of product bans is why regulators don't instead offer the equivalent information, for example through a "would have banned" label. Regulators can want to lie with labels, however, either due to regulatory capture or to correct for market imperfections. Knowing this, consumers discount regulator warnings, and so regulators can prefer bans over the choices of skeptical consumers. But all sides can prefer regulators who are unable to ban products, since then regulator warnings will be taken more seriously. The puzzle of voter information is why voters are not even more poorly informed; press coverage of politics seems out of proportion to its entertainment value. Voters can, however, want to commit to becoming informed, either by learning about issues or by subscribing to sources, to convince candidates to take favorable positions. Voters can also prefer to be in large groups, and to be ignorant in certain ways. This complicates the evaluation of institutions, like voting pools, which reduce ignorance. The puzzle of group insurance as a cure for adverse selection is why this should be less a problem for groups than individuals. The usual argument about reduced variance of types for groups doesn't work in separating equilibria; what matters is the range, not variance, of types. Democratic group choice can, however, narrow the group type range by failing to represent part of the electorate. Furthermore, random juries can completely eliminate adverse selection losses. The puzzle of persistent political disagreement is that for ideal Bayesians with common priors, the mere fact of a factual disagreement is enough of a clue to induce agreement. But what about agents like humans with severe computational limitations? If such agents agree that they are savvy in being aware of these limitations, then any factual disagreement implies disagreement about their average biases. Yet average bias can in principle be computed without any private information. Thus disagreements seem to be fundamentally about priors or computation, rather than information.</p

Self-Organizing Teams in Online Work Settings

As the volume and complexity of distributed online work increases, the collaboration among people who have never worked together in the past is becoming increasingly necessary. Recent research has proposed algorithms to maximize the performance of such teams by grouping workers according to a set of predefined decision criteria. This approach micro-manages workers, who have no say in the team formation process. Depriving users of control over who they will work with stifles creativity, causes psychological discomfort and results in less-than-optimal collaboration results. In this work, we propose an alternative model, called Self-Organizing Teams (SOTs), which relies on the crowd of online workers itself to organize into effective teams. Supported but not guided by an algorithm, SOTs are a new human-centered computational structure, which enables participants to control, correct and guide the output of their collaboration as a collective. Experimental results, comparing SOTs to two benchmarks that do not offer user agency over the collaboration, reveal that participants in the SOTs condition produce results of higher quality and report higher teamwork satisfaction. We also find that, similarly to machine learning-based self-organization, human SOTs exhibit emergent collective properties, including the presence of an objective function and the tendency to form more distinct clusters of compatible teammates

Finding and Fighting for a Future of Bicycles in Boise, Idaho

This thesis will explore Boise, Idaho as a real-world case study of the car dominated American cities, and the potential to enact a large-scale shift to alternative forms of transportation. Examining the complexities of inter-governmental and communal-governmental relationships to better understand the history and current state of infrastructure and alternative transit facilities in Boise and theorizing a best path forward. The thesis will also delve into bicycle activists’ groups operating in Boise, to assess their goals and methods of reaching those goals

Solving hard problems in election systems

An interesting problem in the field of computational social choice theory is that of elections, in which a winner or set of winners is to be deduced from preferences among a collection of agents, in a way that attempts to maximize the collective well-being of the agents. Besides their obvious use in political science, elections are also used computationally, such as in multiagent systems, in which different agents may have different beliefs and preferences and must reach an agreeable decision. Because the purpose of voting is to gain an understanding of a collection of actual preferences, dishonesty in an election system is often harmful to the welfare of the voters as a whole. Different forms of dishonesty can be performed by the voters (manipulation), by an outside agent affecting the voters (bribery), or by the chair, or administrator, of an election (control). The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem shows that in all reasonable election systems, manipulation, or strategic voting, is always inevitable in some cases. Bartholdi, Tovey, and Trick counter by arguing that if finding such a manipulation is NP-hard, then manipulation by computationally-limited agents should not pose a significant threat. However, more recent work has exploited the fact that NP-hardness is only a worst-case measure of complexity, and has shown that some election systems that are NP-hard to manipulate may in fact be easy to manipulate under some reasonable assumptions. We evaluate, both theoretically and empirically, the complexity, worst-case and otherwise, of manipulating, bribing, and controlling elections. Our focus is particularly on scoring protocols. In doing so, we gain an understanding of how these election systems work by discovering what makes manipulation, bribery, and control easy or hard. This allows us to discover the strengths and weaknesses of scoring protocols, and gain an understanding of what properties of election systems are desirable or undesirable. One approach we have used to do this is relating the problems of interest in election systems to problems of known complexity, as well as to problems with known algorithms and heuristics, particularly Satisfiability and Partition. This approach can help us gain an understanding of computational social choice problems in which little is known about the complexity or potential algorithms. Among other results, we show how certain parameters and properties of scoring protocols can make elections easy or hard to manipulate. We find that the empirical complexity of manipulation in some cases have unusual behaviors for its complexity class. For example, it is found that in the case of manipulating the Borda election of unweighted voters with an unbounded candidate cardinality, the encoding of this problem to Satisfiability performs especially well near the boundary cases of this problem and for unsatisfiable instances, both results contrary to the normal behavior of NP-complete problems. Although attempts have been made to design fair election systems with certain properties, another dilemma that this has given rise to is the existence of election systems in which it is hard to elect the winners, at least in the worst case. Two notable election systems in which determining the winners are hard are Dodgson and Young. We evaluate the problem of finding the winners empirically, to extend these complexity results away from the worst case, and determine whether the worst-case complexity of these hard winner problems is truly a computational barrier. We find that, like most NP-complete problems such as Satisfiability, many instances of interest in finding winners of hard election systems are still relatively simple. We confirm that indeed, like Satisfiability, the hard worst-case results occur only in rare circumstances. We also find an interesting complexity disparity between the related problems of finding the Dodgson or Young score of a candidate, and that of finding the set of Dodgson or Young winners. Surprisingly, it appears empirically easier for one to find the set of all winners in a Dodgson or Young election than to score a single candidate in either election