Adapting the Social Network to Affect Elections

8 years 10 days ago

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We investigate the effect a social network could have on voting outcomes. We consider a group of self-interested agents where each agent has a strict preference order over a set of outcomes. Each agent votes strategically, taking into consideration both her preferences, and her (limited) information about the preferences of other voters. We assume that the information the agent has comes from her friends in the social network and from a public opinion poll. If agents were not strategic at all, the social network (and the poll) would not matter, since they would just vote according to their preferences. However, if the agents deviate and vote strategically the network plays a great effect. To measure this effect, we focus on iterative voting with Plurality voting rule. We show, both in theory and in simulations, that for many networks, adding a linear number of edges can make any outcome the winner. We view our results as yet another indication to the effect that a central organizer, s...

Sigal Sina, Noam Hazon, Avinatan Hassidim, Sarit K

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