Example 6.1 Consider an election with three alternatives, a, b, and c, and three voters, 1, 2, and 3. Suppose the rule used is plurality—an alternative gets a point each time it is ranked first by a voter, and the alternative with the most points wins—with ties broken towards alternatives earlier in the alphabet. Suppose voter 3 knows (or strongly suspects) that voter 1 will rank a first in her...

Hardware redundancy may be used in a variety of manners to achieve fault tolerance. One of the most popular techniques is a triple modular redundancy (TMR) scheme. Such a scheme has also been referred to as masking redundancy because failures those affect only if one of the three modules is masked by the majority of the nonfailed modules. Most of the published works on TMR make one crucial assu...

The Southern California Twin Register was initiated in 1984 at the University of Southern California, and continues to grow. This article provides an update of the register since it was described in the 2002 special issue of this journal. The register has expanded considerably in the past 4 years, primarily as a result of recent access to Los Angeles County birth records and voter registration ...

A median of a k-tuple =(x1; : : : ; xk) of elements of a 0nite metric space (X; d) is an element x for which ∑k i=1 d(x; xi) is minimum. The function m with domain the set of all k-tuples with k ¿ 0 and de0ned by m( ) = {x: x is a median of } is called the median function on X . Continuing with the program of characterizing m on various metric spaces, this paper presents a characterization of t...

Clark and Lauderdale develop a novel approach for orienting Supreme Court opinions in unidimensional policy space. They argue that the most important portion of a Court’s opinion is not its judgment in favor of one party or another, but its reasoning, for it is this reasoning that becomes binding law and shapes the path of American legal development. The authors thus measure the policy orientat...

Using a spatial model, we compare different rules for aggregating preferences across confederated districts, under the assumption that voters have private information and face uncertainty about the distribution of preferences of other voters. Our model includes, as special cases, systems of local representation in national assemblies and parliaments and international legislatures with rep­ rese...

This article starts by introducing a new theoretical framework to model spatial systems which is obtained from the framework of interacting particle systems by replacing the traditional graphical structure that defines the network of interactions with a structure of hypergraph. This new perspective is more appropriate to define stochastic spatial processes in which large blocks of vertices may ...

We study sequential voting with two alternatives, in a setting with utility externalities: as usual, each voter has a private preference over the candidates and likes her favorite candidate to win, but additionally, a voter values voting for the chosen winner (which is determined by the majority or super-majority of votes). This model aims to capture voting behavior (”likes”) in social networks...