Reality-Aware Social Choice

Social Choice theory generalizes voting on one proposal to ranking multiple proposals. Yet, while a vote on a single proposal has the status quo (Reality) as a default, Reality has been forsaken during this generalization. Here, we propose to restore this default social state and to incorporate Reality explicitly into Social Choice. We show that doing so gives rise to a new theory, complete with its domain restrictions, voting rules with their Reality-aware axiomatic properties, and certain game-theoretic aspects. In particular, we show how Reality can be used in a principled way to break Condorcet cycles and develop an efficient Reality-aware Condorcet-consistent agenda. We then discuss several applications of Reality-Aware Social Choice

Building a Sybil-Resilient Digital Community Utilizing Trust-Graph Connectivity

Preventing fake or duplicate digital identities (aka sybils) from joining a digital community may be crucial to its survival, especially if it utilizes a consensus protocol among its members or employs democratic governance, where sybils can undermine consensus, tilt decisions, or even take over. Here, we explore the use of a trust-graph of identities, with edges representing trust among identity owners, to allow a community to grow indefinitely without increasing its sybil penetration. Since identities are admitted to the digital community based on their trust by existing digital community members, corrupt identities, which may trust sybils, also pose a threat to the digital community. Sybils and their corrupt perpetrators are together referred to as byzantines, and the overarching aim is to limit their penetration into a digital community. We propose two alternative tools to achieve this goal. One is graph conductance, which works under the assumption that honest people are averse to corrupt ones and tend to distrust them. The second is vertex expansion, which relies on the assumption that there are not too many corrupt identities in the community. Of particular interest is keeping the fraction of byzantines below one third, as it would allow the use of Byzantine Agreement [15] for consensus as well as for sybil-resilient social choice [19]. This paper considers incrementally growing a trust graph and shows that, under its key assumptions and additional requirements, including keeping the conductance or vertex expansion of the community trust graph sufficiently high, a community may grow safely, indefinitely