The (sub-)optimality of the majority rule

We consider collective choice from two alternatives. Ex ante, each agent is uncertain about which alternative she prefers, and may be uncertain about the intensity of her preferences. An environment is given by a probability distribution over utility vectors that is symmetric across agents and neutral across alternatives. In many environments, the majority voting rule maximizes agents' ex-ante expected utilities among all anonymous and dominant-strategy implementable choice rules. But in some environments where the agents' utilities are stochastically correlated, other dominant-strategy choice rules are better for all agents. If utilities are stochastically independent across agents, majority voting is ex-ante optimal among all anonymous and incentive-compatible rules. We also compare rules from an interim viewpoint.majority rule

Spanish epenthesis: Formal and performance perspectives

published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

The Optimal Design of Fallible Organizations: Invariance of Optimal Decision Criterion and Uniqueness of Hierarchy and Polyarchy Structures

We present a general framework to study the project selection problem in an organization of fallible decision-makers. We show that when the organizational size and the majority rule for project acceptance are optimized simultaneously, the optimal quality of decision-making, as determined by the decision criterion, is invariant, and depends only on the expertise of decision-makers. This result clarifies that the circumstances under which the decision-making quality varies with the organizational structure are situations where the organizational size or majority rule is restricted from reaching the optimal level. Moreover, in contrast to earlier findings in the literature that the hierarchy and the polyarchy are suboptimal structures, we show that when the size, structure and decision criterion are simultaneously optimized, the hierarchy and the polyarchy are in fact the only possible optimal organizational structures when decision-making costs are present.organizational decision-making, structure, quality, hierarchy, polyarchy

Optimal strategies of radial velocity observations in planet search surveys

Applications of the theory of optimal design of experiments to radial velocity planet search surveys are considered. Different optimality criteria are discussed, basing on the Fisher, Shannon, and Kullback-Leibler informations. Algorithms of optimal scheduling of RV observations for two important practical problems are considered. The first problem is finding the time for future observations to yield the maximum improvement of the precision of exoplanetary orbital parameters and masses. The second problem is finding the most favourable time for distinguishing alternative orbital fits (the scheduling of discriminating observations). These methods of optimal planning are demonstrated to be potentially efficient for multi-planet extrasolar systems, in particular for resonant ones. In these cases, the optimal dates of observations are often concentrated in quite narrow time segments.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, no tables, Accepted to MNRA