A Mathematical Model for Optimal Decisions in a Representative Democracy
Abstract
Direct democracy, where each voter casts one vote, fails when the average voter competence falls below 50%. This happens in noisy settings when voters have limited information. Representative democracy, where voters choose representatives to vote, can be an elixir in both these situations. We introduce a mathematical model for studying representative democracy, in particular understanding the parameters of a representative democracy that gives maximum decision making capability. Our main result states that under general and natural conditions, 1. for fixed voting cost, the optimal number of representatives is linear; 2. for polynomial cost, the optimal number of representatives is logarithmic.
Cite
Text
Magdon-Ismail and Xia. "A Mathematical Model for Optimal Decisions in a Representative Democracy." Neural Information Processing Systems, 2018.Markdown
[Magdon-Ismail and Xia. "A Mathematical Model for Optimal Decisions in a Representative Democracy." Neural Information Processing Systems, 2018.](https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2018/magdonismail2018neurips-mathematical/)BibTeX
@inproceedings{magdonismail2018neurips-mathematical,
title = {{A Mathematical Model for Optimal Decisions in a Representative Democracy}},
author = {Magdon-Ismail, Malik and Xia, Lirong},
booktitle = {Neural Information Processing Systems},
year = {2018},
pages = {4702-4711},
url = {https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2018/magdonismail2018neurips-mathematical/}
}