In a framework with two parties, deterministic voter preferences and a type of geographical constraints, we propose a set of simple axioms and show that they jointly characterize the districting rule that maximizes the number of districts one party can win, given the distribution of individual...

Can neural networks learn to select an alternative based on a systematic aggregation of conflicting individual preferences (i.e. a 'voting rule')? And if so, which voting rule best describes their behavior? We show that a prominent neural network can be trained to respect two fundamental...

Voting rules can be assessed from quite different perspectives: the axiomatic, the pragmatic, in terms of computational or conceptual simplicity, susceptibility to manipulation, and many others aspects. In this paper, we take the machine learning perspective and ask how 'well' a few prominent...

What determines reciprocity in employment relations? We conducted a controlled field experiment to measure the extent to which monetary and non-monetary gifts affect workers' performance. We find that nonmonetary gifts have a much stronger impact than monetary gifts of equivalent value. We also...

We consider the problem of how societies should be partitioned into classes if individuals express their views about who should be put with whom in the same class. A non-bossy social aggregator depends only on those cells of the individual partitions the society members classify themselves in....

Sequential majority voting over interconnected binary propositions can lead to the overruling of unanimous consensus. We characterize, within the general framework of judgement aggregation, under what circumstances this happens for some sequence of the voting process. It turns out that the class...

Condorcet domains are sets of linear orders with the property that, whenever the preferences of all voters of a society belong to this set, their majority relation has no cycles. We observe that, without loss of generality, every such domain can be assumed to be closed in the sense that it...

We propose a model of "frugal aggregation" in which the evaluation of social welfare must be based on information about agents' top choices plus general qualitative background conditions on preferences. The former is elicited individually, while the latter is not. We apply this model to problems...

It is proved that, among all restricted preference domains that guarantee consistency (i.e. transitivity) of pairwise majority voting, the single-peaked domain is the only minimally rich and connected domain that contains two completely reversed strict preference orders. It is argued that this...

How can we assess the diversity of a group of decision makers? Identifying decision makers with their preferences, we address this question by applying the multi-attribute approach developed by Nehring and Puppe (2002) to sets of preferences. Specifically, we provide a repertoire of alternative...