Dear participants of the Online Social Choice and Welfare Seminar,
Our next seminar will be next Tuesday (2 December). Here are the details.
Time: 9PM GMT (1PM Vancouver, 4PM Boston, 6PM Rio de Janeiro, 9PM London, 10PM Paris, 8AM Wednesday in Sydney, 10AM Wednesday in Auckland)
Speaker: Bailey Flanigan (MIT, Political Science and Computer Science)
Title: “Smoothed Analysis of Social Choice, Revisited”
Abstract: Classical social choice theory is full of axiomatic impossibility results: no voting rule can satisfy all important axioms on every possible preference profile. In this talk, I’ll explore the extent to which these worst-case impossibilities are resolved under “smoothed” noise, where voters’ rankings may be adversarial but are perturbed by small amounts of noise. Within this model, I’ll present simple, general conditions under which common axioms and paradoxes are smoothed-satisfied or smoothed-violated. I’ll then focus on a canonical class of noise models based on the Mallows distribution, which reveals additional, practically-important distinctions between voting rules. Together, these results offer a more nuanced picture of when smoothed analysis meaningfully circumvents axiomatic impossibilities—and when it does not
(Joint work with Daniel Halpern and Alex Psomas)
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Reminder: On the seminar website you can find the video recordings, slides and supplementary materials for all past presentations, as well as information about future presentations.
Economics and Politics Research Group 