127,584 research outputs found
Voting with Limited Information and Many Alternatives
The traditional axiomatic approach to voting is motivated by the problem of
reconciling differences in subjective preferences. In contrast, a dominant line
of work in the theory of voting over the past 15 years has considered a
different kind of scenario, also fundamental to voting, in which there is a
genuinely "best" outcome that voters would agree on if they only had enough
information. This type of scenario has its roots in the classical Condorcet
Jury Theorem; it includes cases such as jurors in a criminal trial who all want
to reach the correct verdict but disagree in their inferences from the
available evidence, or a corporate board of directors who all want to improve
the company's revenue, but who have different information that favors different
options.
This style of voting leads to a natural set of questions: each voter has a
{\em private signal} that provides probabilistic information about which option
is best, and a central question is whether a simple plurality voting system,
which tabulates votes for different options, can cause the group decision to
arrive at the correct option. We show that plurality voting is powerful enough
to achieve this: there is a way for voters to map their signals into votes for
options in such a way that --- with sufficiently many voters --- the correct
option receives the greatest number of votes with high probability. We show
further, however, that any process for achieving this is inherently expensive
in the number of voters it requires: succeeding in identifying the correct
option with probability at least requires voters, where is the number of options and is a
distributional measure of the minimum difference between the options
Lost in Translation: Social Choice Theory is Misapplied Against Legislative Intent
Several prominent scholars use results from social choice theory to conclude that legislative intent is meaningless. We disagree. We support our argument by showing that the conclusions in question are based on misapplications of the theory. Some of the conclusions in question are based on Arrow\u27s famous General Possibility Theorem. We identify a substantial chasm between what Arrow proves and what others claim in his name. Other conclusions come from a failure to realize that applying social choice theory to questions of legislative intent entails accepting assumptions such as legislators are omniscient and legislators have infinite resources for changing law and policy. We demonstrate that adding more realistic assumptions to models of social choice theory yields very different theoretical results-including ones that allow for meaningful inferences about legislative intent. In all of the cases we describe, important aspects of social choice theory were lost in the translation from abstract formalisms to real political and legal domains. When properly understood, social choice theory is insufficient to negate legislative intent
Plural Voting for the Twenty-First Century
Recent political developments cast doubt on the wisdom of democratic decision-making. Brexit, the Colombian people's (initial) rejection of peace with the FARC, and the election of Donald Trump suggest that the time is right to explore alternatives to democracy. In this essay, I describe and defend the epistocratic system of government which is, given current theoretical and empirical knowledge, most likely to produce optimal political outcomesâor at least better outcomes than democracy produces. To wit, we should expand the suffrage as wide as possible and weight citizensâ votes in accordance with their competence. As it turns out, the optimal system is closely related to J. S. Mill's plural voting proposal. I also explain how votersâ competences can be precisely determined, without reference to an objective standard of correctness and without generating invidious comparisons between voters
Parameterized Algorithmics for Computational Social Choice: Nine Research Challenges
Computational Social Choice is an interdisciplinary research area involving
Economics, Political Science, and Social Science on the one side, and
Mathematics and Computer Science (including Artificial Intelligence and
Multiagent Systems) on the other side. Typical computational problems studied
in this field include the vulnerability of voting procedures against attacks,
or preference aggregation in multi-agent systems. Parameterized Algorithmics is
a subfield of Theoretical Computer Science seeking to exploit meaningful
problem-specific parameters in order to identify tractable special cases of in
general computationally hard problems. In this paper, we propose nine of our
favorite research challenges concerning the parameterized complexity of
problems appearing in this context
Reve\{a,i\}ling the risks: a phenomenology of information security
In information security research, perceived security usually has a negative meaning, when it is used in contrast to actual security. From a phenomenological perspective, however, perceived security is all we have. In this paper, we develop a phenomenological account of information security, where we distinguish between revealed and reveiled security instead. Linking these notions with the concepts of confidence and trust, we are able to give a phenomenological explanation of the electronic voting controversy in the Netherlands
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