1. THE PROBLEM. Something is rotten in the electoral state of the United States. Mathematics is involved. Advances in computer technology—hardware and software— have permitted a great leap “forward” in the fine art of political gerrymandering—“the practice of dividing a geographical area into electoral districts, often of highly irregular shape, to give one political party an unfair advantage b...

Learning-from-crowds aims to design proper aggregation strategies to infer the unknown true labels from the noisy labels provided by ordinary web workers. This paper presents max-margin majority voting (MV) to improve the discriminative ability of majority voting and further presents a Bayesian generalization to incorporate the flexibility of generative methods on modeling noisy observations wi...

A benchmark result in the political economy of taxation is that majority voting over a linear income tax schedule will result in an inefficiently high tax rate whenever the median voter has a below average income. The present paper examines the role of tax avoidance for this welfare assessment. We find that the inefficiency in the voting equilibrium is the lower, the higher the average level of...

Longstanding results demonstrate that, if policy choices are defined in spaces with more than one dimension, a majority rule equilibrium fails to exist for a very general class of smooth preference profiles. However we show here that if agents perceive political similarity and difference in “city block” terms, then the dimension-by-dimension median can be a majority rule equilibrium even in spa...

The majority runoff system is widely used around the world, yet our understanding of its properties and of voters’ behavior is limited. In this paper, we fully characterize the set of strictly perfect voting equilibria in large three-candidate majority runoff elections. Considering all possible distributions of preference orderings and intensities, we prove that only two types of equilibria can...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the welfare state. In a model that integrates majority voting and lobbying by interest groups, we show how the bargaining power of the unskilled and the skilled workers’ lobby affects the size of the welfare state: The more influential the union representing the unskilled, the greater the extent of redistribution. On the other hand, the presence of depend...

Majority voting and social evaluation functions are the main alternatives proposed in the literature for aggregatingindividual preferences. Despite these being very different, this papershows that the ranking of income distributions, symmetric under the same transformation, by S-Gini consistent social evaluation functions and majority voting coincide if and only if the inequality index under co...

The widely discussed ‘discursive dilemma’shows that majority voting in a group of individuals on logically connected propositions may produce irrational collective judgments. We generalize majority voting by considering quota rules, which accept each proposition if and only if the number of individuals accepting it exceeds a given threshold, where di¤erent thresholds may be used for di¤erent pr...

Feature extraction is an important step of pattern recognition. This study uses profile based feature extraction and uses Simple Profile (with cropping and without cropping image samples), Contour based feature extraction for recognizing handwritten numerals. The features are computed by using 48 X 48 as a feature length classifier used Back propagation neural network for the classification.. T...