ZLC Seminar Series: Mozart Menezes

“The Wisdom of Voters: Evaluating the Weber Objective at the Condorcet Solution”

Abstract

In this work-in-progress we focus on discussing the quality of democratic decisions (i.e. made by vote) when compared to those provided by a central decision maker. The central decision maker, which could be referred to as a benevolent dictator, makes the decision considering all information and attempts to maximize the sum of the utility obtained. Voters, on the other hand, may only attempt to maximize their individual utilities leading to under-optimal solutions as measured by the maxi-sum objective. Our preliminary results suggest that the price paid by utilizing a democratic process for making decision may be indeed not that high if the decision is not restricted to a single elected-candidate (e.g. choosing several sites for new hospitals versus a single site). The quality of the solution induced by voting seems to improve with the cardinality of the solution set. Random network experiments suggest that in practice the gap between the two solution approaches may be negligible.

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