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Representative Committees of Peers

Author

Listed:
  • Reshef Meir
  • Fedor Sandomirskiy
  • Moshe Tennenholtz
Abstract
A population of voters must elect representatives among themselves to decide on a sequence of possibly unforeseen binary issues. Voters care only about the final decision, not the elected representatives. The disutility of a voter is proportional to the fraction of issues, where his preferences disagree with the decision. While an issue-by-issue vote by all voters would maximize social welfare, we are interested in how well the preferences of the population can be approximated by a small committee. We show that a k-sortition (a random committee of k voters with the majority vote within the committee) leads to an outcome within the factor 1+O(1/k) of the optimal social cost for any number of voters n, any number of issues $m$, and any preference profile. For a small number of issues m, the social cost can be made even closer to optimal by delegation procedures that weigh committee members according to their number of followers. However, for large m, we demonstrate that the k-sortition is the worst-case optimal rule within a broad family of committee-based rules that take into account metric information about the preference profile of the whole population.

Suggested Citation

  • Reshef Meir & Fedor Sandomirskiy & Moshe Tennenholtz, 2020. "Representative Committees of Peers," Papers 2006.07837, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2006.07837
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Kim C. Border & J. S. Jordan, 1983. "Straightforward Elections, Unanimity and Phantom Voters," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 50(1), pages 153-170.
    2. James Green-Armytage, 2015. "Direct voting and proxy voting," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 26(2), pages 190-220, June.
    3. Dennis Mueller & Robert Tollison & Thomas Willett, 1972. "Representative democracy via random selection," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 12(1), pages 57-68, March.
    4. Austen-Smith, David & Banks, Jeffrey, 1988. "Elections, Coalitions, and Legislative Outcomes," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 82(2), pages 405-422, June.
    5. Dan Alger, 2006. "Voting by proxy," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 126(1), pages 1-26, January.
    6. Pivato, Marcus & Soh, Arnold, 2020. "Weighted representative democracy," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(C), pages 52-63.
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    Cited by:

    1. Arnold Cédrick SOH VOUTSA, 2020. "Approval Voting & Majority Judgment in Weighted Representative Democracy," THEMA Working Papers 2020-15, THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise.
    2. Gersbach, Hans & Mamageishvili, Akaki & Tejada, Oriol, 2020. "Appointed Learning for the Common Good: Optimal Committee Size and Efficient Rewards," CEPR Discussion Papers 15311, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.

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