Ashish Goel, Stanford University
Title: Decision making at scale: Algorithms, platforms, and mechanisms
Abstract: YouTube competes with Hollywood as an entertainment channel, and also supplements Hollywood by acting as a distribution mechanism. Twitter has a similar relationship to news media, and Coursera to Universities. But there are no online alternatives for making democratic decisions at large scale as a society. In this talk, we will describe some algorithmic approaches towards large scale decision making that we are exploring. In particular, we will describe algorithms for voting in elections which design a budget, and for deliberative processes where a group decision in made via a succession of individual iteration (inspired by prediction markets) or small group interactions (inspired by Nash bargaining). We will also present general impossibility and fairness results for cardinal utilities given ordinal votes, under the metric assumption.
We will also describe our experience running crowdsourced democracy processes in the US, Canada, and Finland. Finally, we will outline several open algorithmic and game-theoretic problems in this space.
This represents joint work with Tanja Aitamurto, Brandon Fain, Nikhil Garg, Vijay Kamble, Anilesh Krishnaswamy, David Marn, Kamesh Munagala, and Sukolsak Sakshuwong.