Heuristic Strategies in Uncertain Approval Voting Environments

In many collective decision making situations, agents vote to choose an alternative that best represents the preferences of the group. Agents may manipulate the vote to achieve a better outcome by voting in a way that does not reflect their true preferences. In real world voting scenarios, people often do not have complete information about other voter preferences and it can be computationally complex to identify a strategy that will maximize their expected utility. In such situations, it is often assumed that voters will vote truthfully rather than expending the effort to strategize. However, being truthful is just one possible heuristic that may be used. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of heuristics in single winner and multi-winner approval voting scenarios with missing votes. In particular, we look at heuristics where a voter ignores information about other voting profiles and makes their decisions based solely on how much they like each candidate. In a behavioral experiment, we show that people vote truthfully in some situations and prioritize high utility candidates in others. We examine when these behaviors maximize expected utility and show how the structure of the voting environment affects both how well each heuristic performs and how humans employ these heuristics.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1905.1210

Heuristics in Multi-Winner Approval Voting

In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting. Moreover, scenarios such as committee or board elections require voting rules that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent may vote for as many candidates as they wish. Winners are chosen by tallying up the votes and choosing the top-$k$ candidates receiving the most votes. An agent may manipulate the vote to achieve a better outcome by voting in a way that does not reflect their true preferences. In complex and uncertain situations, agents may use heuristics to strategize, instead of incurring the additional effort required to compute the manipulation which most favors them. In this paper, we examine voting behavior in multi-winner approval voting scenarios with complete information. We show that people generally manipulate their vote to obtain a better outcome, but often do not identify the optimal manipulation. Instead, voters tend to prioritize the candidates with the highest utilities. Using simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of these heuristics in situations where agents only have access to partial information

Modeling Voters in Multi-Winner Approval Voting

In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting and, in scenarios such as committee or board elections, employing voting rules that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent submits a ballot consisting of approvals for as many candidates as they wish, and winners are chosen by tallying up the votes and choosing the top-$k$ candidates receiving the most approvals. In many scenarios, an agent may manipulate the ballot they submit in order to achieve a better outcome by voting in a way that does not reflect their true preferences. In complex and uncertain situations, agents may use heuristics instead of incurring the additional effort required to compute the manipulation which most favors them. In this paper, we examine voting behavior in single-winner and multi-winner approval voting scenarios with varying degrees of uncertainty using behavioral data obtained from Mechanical Turk. We find that people generally manipulate their vote to obtain a better outcome, but often do not identify the optimal manipulation. There are a number of predictive models of agent behavior in the COMSOC and psychology literature that are based on cognitively plausible heuristic strategies. We show that the existing approaches do not adequately model real-world data. We propose a novel model that takes into account the size of the winning set and human cognitive constraints, and demonstrate that this model is more effective at capturing real-world behaviors in multi-winner approval voting scenarios.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. To be published in the Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 202

Why Dominant Governing Parties Are Cross-Nationally Influential

Previous research suggests that political parties learn from and emulate the successful election strategies of governing parties in other countries. But what explains variation in the degree of influence that governing parties have on their foreign counterparts? We argue that “clarity of responsibility” within government, or the concentration of executive responsibility in the hands of a dominant governing party, allows parties to learn from the most obviously electorally successful incumbents. It therefore enhances the cross-national diffusion of party programs. To test this expectation, we analyze parties’ policy positions in 26 established democracies since 1977. Our results indicate that parties disproportionately learn from and emulate dominant, highclarity foreign incumbents. This finding contributes to a better understanding of the political consequences of “government clarity” and sheds new light on the heuristics that engender party policy diffusion by demonstrating that the most visible foreign incumbents, whose platforms have yielded concentrated power in office, influence party politics “at home.

The Look of Leadership: Do Perceptions of Facial Features Relate to Perceptions of Character Traits in Political Candidates?

By examining whether or not perceptions of facial features relate to perceptions of character traits in political candidates, this paper attempts to explore the implications of what voters look for when examining candidates based solely on appearance. Respondentsare thought tobe looking to put their trust in a representative to represent them fairly and wisely, the trustee representative, results are expected toshow respondents look for universal features that are perceived to be connected to perceptions of trustworthiness, honesty, leadership and competency. Respondents will be looking to delegate their political responsibilities to a representative that they assume to have similar interests, the delegate representative, if respondents are found to look for facial similarity between themselves and the candidates they rate higher in trustworthiness, honesty, leadership and competency. Results show consistently significant relationships with different features associated with youth resulting in higher trustworthiness and honesty ratings.Results also shows significant results relating pointier facial structure to lower honesty and trustworthiness ratings.Preliminary results warrant further exploration of theserelationships with a morerefined method and more precise measures, which will be accomplishedin future work

Bridging Systems: Open Problems for Countering Destructive Divisiveness across Ranking, Recommenders, and Governance

Divisiveness appears to be increasing in much of the world, leading to concern about political violence and a decreasing capacity to collaboratively address large-scale societal challenges. In this working paper we aim to articulate an interdisciplinary research and practice area focused on what we call bridging systems: systems which increase mutual understanding and trust across divides, creating space for productive conflict, deliberation, or cooperation. We give examples of bridging systems across three domains: recommender systems on social media, collective response systems, and human-facilitated group deliberation. We argue that these examples can be more meaningfully understood as processes for attention-allocation (as opposed to "content distribution" or "amplification") and develop a corresponding framework to explore similarities - and opportunities for bridging - across these seemingly disparate domains. We focus particularly on the potential of bridging-based ranking to bring the benefits of offline bridging into spaces which are already governed by algorithms. Throughout, we suggest research directions that could improve our capacity to incorporate bridging into a world increasingly mediated by algorithms and artificial intelligence.Comment: 40 pages, 11 figures. See https://bridging.systems for more about this wor

A Correlational Study of the Relationships Between Individual Entrepreneurial Orientations of Community College Leaders and College Students’ Success

The purpose of this study was to examine the mathematical relationships between the individual entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) of academic leaders in the Florida College System and their institutions’ student success rates. Some leaders in academia have suggested that academic leaders of postsecondary institutions adopt entrepreneurial behaviors and traits in an effort to adapt to rapidly changing environments. In this descriptive study, academic leaders in the Florida College system were surveyed to determine their IEO. The researcher obtained student success rates for each institution in the Florida College System. Data were analyzed using Pearson r correlations between IEO scores of academic leaders who responded to the survey (president, vice-president, academic dean, or other) and institutional student success rates to determine whether significant correlations existed between IEO and student success rates. Linear regression was also conducted to determine whether IEO was a predictor of student success. The results indicated that the average IEO scores of the Florida College System leaders was high; however, no significant relationships between IEO and student success were evident in this sample. In addition, IEO scores were not significant predictors of student success rates

The Systems Approach to Teaching Business Associations

The systems approach applies the methods of systems analysis to law. The principal method is to describe the system, situate a problem within the system, and take system mechanics into account in solving it. The system might be the “legal system”—essentially litigation. But more often, it is a “law-related system”—one not composed of law, but one in which law plays a role. That system might be crime, the Internet, the corporation, or any other activity substantially affected by law. The analyst situates the application of law in the context of the physical system as it actually operates. In business associations, that context may be law offices, boardrooms, the daily interactions of business co-owners, as well as courtrooms and settlement discussions. One situates the application of law in the context of the physical system by describing the system with emphasis on the causal connections through which it operates

Contractual Compliance and the Federal Income Tax System

The income tax system has become a critical foundation for modern democracies, providing the primary means of financing the expansion of rights and obligations. Thus, the tax system provides a critical research site for understanding not only compliance with tax obligations, but also for understanding the broader relationship between democratic citizens and their government. In this Essay, I will elaborate on the adaptive contractarian perspective and apply it to the obligation to pay personal income taxes—the financial foundation of modern governance. The goal of the forthcoming book from which this Essay is taken is to empirically test the relevance of this perspective for explaining both the main features of the tax system and citizens’ compliance with tax obligations. Additionally, we (the book’s authors) will consider the implications of this perspective for the design of tax enforcement systems and policies. We hypothesize that citizens obey tax laws to the extent that other citizens and governmental institutions meet their related obligations, and that the coercive institutions of governance, in turn, are compelled to respect citizens’ rights