Implicit Utilitarian Voting
Implicit utilitarian voting (IUV) is a voting system in which the agents express their preferences by ranking the alternatives (like in ranked voting), and the system tries to select an alternative which maximizes the sum of utilities, as in the utilitarian social choice rule and utilitarian voting. The main challenge in IUV is that the rankings do not contain sufficient information to calculate the utilities. For example, if Alice ranks option 1 above option 2, we do not know whether Alice's utility from option 1 is much higher than from option 2, or only slightly higher. So if Bob ranks option 2 above option 1, we cannot know which of the two options maximizes the sum of utilities. Since a voting-rule that can only access the rankings cannot find the max-sum alternative in all cases, IUV aims to find a voting-rule that approximates the max-sum alternative. The quality of an approximation can be measured in several ways. # The ''distortion'' of a voting-rule is the worst-case ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Voting System
An electoral system or voting system is a set of rules that determine how elections and referendums are conducted and how their results are determined. Electoral systems are used in politics to elect governments, while non-political elections may take place in business, non-profit organisations and informal organisations. These rules govern all aspects of the voting process: when elections occur, who is allowed to vote, who can stand as a candidate, how ballots are marked and cast, how the ballots are counted, how votes translate into the election outcome, limits on campaign spending, and other factors that can affect the result. Political electoral systems are defined by constitutions and electoral laws, are typically conducted by election commissions, and can use multiple types of elections for different offices. Some electoral systems elect a single winner to a unique position, such as prime minister, president or governor, while others elect multiple winners, such as memb ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ranked Voting
The term ranked voting (also known as preferential voting or ranked choice voting) refers to any voting system in which voters ranking, rank their candidates (or options) in a sequence of first or second (or third, etc.) on their respective ballots. Ranked voting systems differ on the basis of how the ballots are marked, how the preferences are tabulated and counted, how many seats are filled, and whether voters are allowed to rank candidates equally. An electoral system that uses ranked voting uses one of the many available counting methods to select the winning candidate or candidates. There is also variation among ranked voting electoral systems in that in some ranked voting systems, officials require voters to rank a set number of candidates, sometimes all of them; in others, citizens may rank as many candidates as they see fit. Election of single members using ranked votes is often instant-runoff voting. Election of multiple members using ranked votes is usually single tr ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Utilitarian Social Choice Rule
In social choice and operations research, the utilitarian rule (also called the max-sum rule) is a rule saying that, among all possible alternatives, society should pick the alternative which maximizes the ''sum of the utilities'' of all individuals in society. It is a formal mathematical representation of the utilitarian philosophy. Definition Let X be a set of possible `states of the world' or `alternatives'. Society wishes to choose a single state from X. For example, in a single-winner election, X may represent the set of candidates; in a resource allocation setting, X may represent all possible allocations of the resource. Let I be a finite set, representing a collection of individuals. For each i \in I, let u_i:X\longrightarrow\mathbb be a ''utility function'', describing the amount of happiness an individual ''i'' derives from each possible state. A '' social choice rule'' is a mechanism which uses the data (u_i)_ to select some element(s) from X which are `best' for s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Utilitarian Voting
Score voting or range voting is an electoral system for single-seat elections, in which voters give each candidate a score, the scores are added (or averaged), and the candidate with the highest total is elected. It has been described by various other names including evaluative voting, utilitarian voting, interval measure voting, the point system, ratings summation, 0-99 voting, average voting and utility voting. It is a type of cardinal voting electoral system, and aims to implement the Utilitarian rule, utilitarian social choice rule. Score voting should be distinguished from positional voting systems, such as the Borda count: in score voting, each voter is free to give any score to any candidate; in positional voting, the score that each voter gives to each candidate is uniquely determined by the candidate's rank in the voter's ballot. Usage Political use Combined approval voting, a 3-rank form of score voting, is used to determine which candidates represent the parties ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Preference Elicitation
Preference elicitation refers to the problem of developing a decision support system capable of generating recommendations to a user, thus assisting in decision making. It is important for such a system to model user's preferences accurately, find hidden preferences and avoid redundancy. This problem is sometimes studied as a computational learning theory problem. Another approach for formulating this problem is a partially observable Markov decision process. The formulation of this problem is also dependent upon the context of the area in which it is studied. Overview With the explosion of on-line information new opportunities for finding and using electronic data have been generated, these changes have also brought the task of eliciting useful information to the forefront. Researchers as well as major online catalog companies have come up with algorithms and prototypes of systems that can aid a user to be able to navigate through a complex and huge information space using some inf ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Participatory Budgeting
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a type of citizen sourcing in which ordinary people decide how to allocate part of a municipal or public budget through a process of democratic deliberation and decision-making. Participatory budgeting allows citizens or residents of a locality to identify, discuss, and prioritize public spending projects, and gives them the power to make real decisions about how money is spent. Participatory budgeting processes are typically designed to involve those left out of traditional methods of public engagement, such as low-income residents, non-citizens, and youth. A comprehensive case study of eight municipalities in Brazil analyzing the successes and failures of participatory budgeting has suggested that it often results in more equitable public spending, greater government transparency and accountability, increased levels of public participation (especially by marginalized or poorer residents), and democratic and citizenship learning. Participatory ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Utilitarian Cake-cutting
Utilitarian cake-cutting (also called maxsum cake-cutting) is a rule for dividing a heterogeneous resource, such as a cake or a land-estate, among several partners with different cardinal utility functions, such that the ''sum'' of the utilities of the partners is as large as possible. It is a special case of the utilitarian social choice rule. Utilitarian cake-cutting is often not "fair"; hence, utilitarianism is often in conflict with fair cake-cutting. Example Consider a cake with two parts: chocolate and vanilla, and two partners: Alice and George, with the following valuations: The utilitarian rule gives each part to the partner with the highest utility. In this case, the utilitarian rule gives the entire chocolate to Alice and the entire Vanilla to George. The maxsum is 13. The utilitarian division is not fair: it is not proportional since George receives less than half the total cake value, and it is not envy-free since George envies Alice. Notation The cake is calle ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Social Choice Theory
Social choice theory or social choice is a theoretical framework for analysis of combining individual opinions, preferences, interests, or welfares to reach a ''collective decision'' or ''social welfare'' in some sense.Amartya Sen (2008). "Social Choice,". ''The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics'', 2nd EditionAbstract & TOC./ref> Whereas choice theory is concerned with individuals making choices based on their preferences, social choice theory is concerned with how to translate the preferences of individuals into the preferences of a group. A non-theoretical example of a collective decision is enacting a law or set of laws under a constitution. Another example is voting, where individual preferences over candidates are collected to elect a person that best represents the group's preferences. Social choice blends elements of welfare economics and public choice theory. It is methodologically individualistic, in that it aggregates preferences and behaviors of individual member ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Preferential Electoral Systems
In psychology, economics and philosophy, preference is a technical term usually used in relation to choosing between alternatives. For example, someone prefers A over B if they would rather choose A than B. Preferences are central to decision theory because of this relation to behavior. Some methods such as Ordinal Priority Approach use preference relation for decision-making. As connative states, they are closely related to desires. The difference between the two is that desires are directed at one object while preferences concern a comparison between two alternatives, of which one is preferred to the other. In insolvency, the term is used to determine which outstanding obligation the insolvent party has to settle first. Psychology In psychology, preferences refer to an individual's attitude towards a set of objects, typically reflected in an explicit decision-making process (Lichtenstein & Slovic, 2006). The term is also used to mean evaluative judgment in the sense of liking ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Cardinal Electoral Systems
Cardinal voting refers to any electoral system which allows the voter to give each candidate an independent evaluation, typically a rating or grade. These are also referred to as "rated" (ratings ballot), "evaluative", "graded", or "absolute" voting systems. ''Cardinal'' methods (based on cardinal utility) and '' ordinal methods'' (based on ''ordinal utility'') are two main categories of modern voting systems, along with plurality voting. Variants There are several voting systems that allow independent ratings of each candidate. For example: * Approval voting (AV) is the simplest possible method, which allows only the two grades (0, 1): "approved" or "unapproved". * Evaluative voting (EV) or combined approval voting (CAV) uses 3 grades (−1, 0, +1): "against", "abstain", or "for". * Score voting or range voting, in which ratings are numerical and the candidate with the highest ''average'' (or total) rating wins. ** Score voting uses a discrete integer scale, typicall ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |