Trust in Public Opinion Polls

The welfare effects of public opinion polls

This paper presents an experimental study of the effects of polls on voters’ welfare. The analysis shows that polls have a different effect on closely divided and lopsided divided electorates. The data show that in closely divided electorates (and only for these electorates) the provision of information on the voters’ distribution of preferences significantly raises the participation of subject...

Deliberative Polls: toward Improved Measures of "informed" Public Opinion?

New research techniques have recently been developed to gather measures of public opinion that is better informed or more deliberative than that recorded in typical mass opinion surveys. These techniques include deliberative polls, educational surveys, and citizen planning cells. In view of what they set out to accomplish, what can we say from a scientific perspective about the utility of these...

Incentive-compatible Online Opinion Polls

The basic idea behind such information markets is that the pricing scheme of the market encourages the participants to buy or sell shares in accordance to their private information. Consider, for example, the security that pays $1 if the winner of the 2008 US presidential elections is democrat. An agent who privately believes with probability p that US will have a democrat president in 2008, wi...

Toward an Understanding of the Cyclical Formation of Public Opinion: Presidential Approval Ratings and Public Opinion Polls

Long-term data resilience using opinion polls

Opinion Polls can be used as a means to reach weak agreement, an idea introduced by the LOCKSS system [1]. In this paper, we investigate a set of protocols that achieve data resilience for the long-term using a peer-to-peer network, where mutually untrusted peers are loosely organized. Peers use Opinion Polls to heal corrupted copies of data items instead of conventional methods that use consen...