TBAAlicia von Schenk
24. November 2022
Felix Brandt (Technische Universität München) presents his project "A Natural Adaptive Process for Collective Decision-Making" in our hybrid Microeconomics Research Seminar @VMP5, Room 0031, next to HASPA Café and via Zoom on Thursday, April 28, 5:15-6:45 PM. To register for the seminar, you may write to huyen.nguyen-1"AT"uni-hamburg.de or jesus.sanchez.ibrahim"AT"uni-hamburg.de.
Abstract: Consider an urn filled with balls, each labeled with one of several possible collective decisions. Now, draw two balls from the urn, let a random voter pick her more preferred as the collective decision, relabel the losing ball with the collective decision, put both balls back into the urn, and repeat. In order to prevent the permanent disappearance of some types of balls, once in a while, a randomly drawn ball is relabeled with a random collective decision. We prove that the empirical distribution of collective decisions converges towards the outcome of a celebrated probabilistic voting rule proposed by Peter C. Fishburn (Rev. Econ. Stud., 51(4), 1984). The proposed procedure bears strong similarities to natural processes studied in biology, physics, and chemistry as well as algorithms proposed in machine learning. It is more flexible than traditional voting rules because it does not require a central authority, elicits very little information, and allows voters to arrive, leave, and change their preferences over time.