This paper uses the Banzhaf power measure to calculate the a priori voting power of individual voters under the existing Electoral College system for electing the President of the United States, as well as under variants of this system in which electoral votes are either apportioned among the states in a different manner or cast by the states in a different manner. While the present winner-take...

We analyze how network effects affect competition in the nascent cryptocurrency market. We do so by examining early dynamics of exchange rates among different cryptocurrencies. While Bitcoin essentially dominates this market, our data suggest no evidence of a winner-take-all effect early in the market. Indeed, for a relatively long period, a few other cryptocurrencies competing with Bitcoin (th...

Artificial spike-based computation, inspired by models of computations in the central nervous system, may present significant performance advantages over traditional methods for specific types of large scale problems. In this paper, we study new models for two common instances of such computation, winner-take-all and coincidence detection. In both cases, very fast convergence is achieved indepe...

We analyze the risk-taking behavior of political candidates who are uncertain about the values voters assign to various policy platforms. We show that the majoritarian and proportional electoral systems lead to different outcomes. The proportional system penalizes risky platforms more than the winner-take-all system. Since candidates choose “safer” platforms, in the proportional system voters f...

This experiment compares the performance of two contest designs: a standard winnertake-all tournament with a single fixed prize, and a novel proportional-payment design in which that same prize is divided among contestants by their share of total achievement. We find that proportional prizes elicit more entry and more total achievement than the winner-take-all tournament. The proportional-prize...

The United States, uniquely among all countries, elects its head of state using a two-tiered system called the Electoral College. If we view the states that make up the Electoral College as voters and make some simplifying assumptions, it is possible to use the theory of voting and voting power to measure the power of the individual states in a presidential election. Modeling the Electoral Coll...