This book is a survey on the problem of choosing from a tournament. It brings together under a unified and self-contained presentation results and concepts from Graph Theory, Choice Theory, Decision Science and Social Choice which were discovered in the last ten years. Classical scoring and ranking methods are introduced, including the Slater orderings, as well as new statistical methods for describing a tournament, graph-theoretical methods based on the covering relation and game-theoretical methods. As an illustration, results are applied to the classical problem of Majority Voting: How to deal with the Condorcet Paradox.

This book is a survey on the problem of choosing from a tournament. It brings together under a unified and self-contained presentation results and concepts from Graph Theory, Choice Theory, Decision Science and Social Choice which were discovered in the last ten years. Classical scoring and ranking methods are introduced, including the Slater orderings, as well as new statistical methods for describing a tournament, graph-theoretical methods based on the covering relation and game-theoretical methods. As an illustration, results are applied to the classical problem of Majority Voting: How to deal with the Condorcet Paradox.

This textbook contains a rigorous exposition of the mathematical foundations of two of the most important topics in politics and economics: voting and apportionment, at the level of upper undergraduate and beginning graduate students. It stands out among comparable books by providing, in one volume, an extensive and mathematically rigorous treatment of these two topics. The text’s three chapters cover social choice, yes-no voting, and apportionment, respectively, and can be covered in any order, allowing teachers ample flexibility. Each chapter begins with an elementary introduction and several examples to motivate the concepts and to gradually lead to more advanced material. Landmark theorems are presented with detailed and streamlined proofs; those requiring more complex proofs, such as Arrow’s theorems on dictatorship, Gibbard’s theorem on oligarchy, and Gärdenfors’ theorem on manipulation, are broken down into propositions and lemmas in order to make them easier to grasp. Simple and intuitive notations are emphasized over non-standard, overly complicated symbols. Additionally, each chapter ends with exercises that vary from computational to “prove or disprove” types. The Mathematics of Voting and Apportionment will be particularly well-suited for a course in the mathematics of voting and apportionment for upper-level undergraduate and beginning graduate students in economics, political science, or philosophy, or for an elective course for math majors. In addition, this book will be a suitable read for to any curious mathematician looking for an exposition to these unpublicized mathematical applications. No political science prerequisites are needed. Mathematical prerequisites (included in the book) are minimal: elementary concepts in combinatorics, graph theory, order relations, and the harmonic and geometric means. What is needed most is the level of maturity that enables the student to think logically, derive results from axioms and hypotheses, and intuitively grasp logical notions such as “contrapositive” and “counterexample.”

This Handbook provides an overview of interdisciplinary research related to social choice and voting that is intended for a broad audience. Expert contributors from various fields present critical summaries of the existing literature, including intuitive explanations of technical terminology and well-known theorems, suggesting new directions for research.

This book contains a selection of refereed papers presented at the "International Conference on Operations Research (OR 2014)", which took place at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, September 2-5, 2014. More than 800 scientists and students from 47 countries attended OR 2014 and presented more than 500 papers in parallel topical streams, as well as special award sessions. The theme of the conference and its proceedings is "Business Analytics and Optimization".

Both theoretical and empirical aspects of single- and multi-winner voting procedures are presented in this collection of papers. Starting from a discussion of the underlying principles of democratic representation, the volume includes a description of a great variety of voting procedures. It lists and illustrates their susceptibility to the main voting paradoxes, assesses (under various models of voters' preferences) the probability of paradoxical outcomes, and discusses the relevance of the theoretical results to the choice of voting system.

This book provides an overview of the main methods and results in the formal study of the human decision-making process, as defined in a relatively wide sense. A key aim of the approach contained here is to try to break down barriers between various disciplines encompassed by this field, including psychology, economics and computer science. All these approaches have contributed to progress in this very important and much-studied topic in the past, but none have proved sufficient so far to define a complete understanding of the highly complex processes and outcomes. This book provides the reader with state-of-the-art coverage of the field, essentially forming a roadmap to the field of decision analysis. The first part of the book is devoted to basic concepts and techniques for representing and solving decision problems, ranging from operational research to artificial intelligence. Later chapters provide an extensive overview of the decision-making process under conditions of risk and uncertainty. Finally, there are chapters covering various approaches to multi-criteria decision-making. Each chapter is written by experts in the topic concerned, and contains an extensive bibliography for further reading and reference.

In the ten years since the publication of the best-selling first edition, more than 1,000 graph theory papers have been published each year. Reflecting these advances, Handbook of Graph Theory, Second Edition provides comprehensive coverage of the main topics in pure and applied graph theory. This second edition-over 400 pages longer than its prede

Knockout tournaments constitute a very common and important form of social institution. They are perhaps best known in sporting competitions, but also play a key role in other social and commercial settings as they model a specific type of election scheme (namely, sequential pairwise elimination election). In such tournaments the organizer controls the shape of the tournament (a binary tree) and the seeding of the players (their assignment to the tree leaves). A tournament can involve millions of people and billions of dollars, and yet there is no consensus on how it should be organized. It is usually dependent on arbitrary decisions of the organizers, and it remains unclear why one design receives precedence over another. The question turns out to be surprisingly subtle. It depends among other things on (a) the objective, (b) the model of the players, (c) the constraints on the structure of the tournament, and (d) whether one considers only ordinal solutions or also cardinal ones. We investigate the problem of finding a good or optimal tournament design across various settings. We first focus on the problem of tournament schedule control, i.e., designing a tournament that maximizes the winning probability of a target player. While the complexity of the general problem is still unknown, various constraints -- all naturally occurring in practice -- serve to push the problem to one side or the other: easy (polynomial) or hard (NP-complete). We then address the question of how to find a fair tournament. We consider two alternative fairness criteria, adapted from the literature: envy-freeness and order preservation. For each setting, we provide either impossibility results or algorithms (either exact or heuristic) to find such a fair tournament. We show through experiments that our heuristics are both efficient and effective. Finally, using a combination of analytic and experimental tools we investigate the optimality of ordinal solutions for three objective functions: maximizing the predictive power, maximizing the expected value of the winner, and maximizing the revenue of the tournament. The analysis relies on innovative upper bounds that allow us to evaluate the optimality of any seeding, even when the number of possible seedings is extremely large.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Web and Internet Economics, WINE 2018, held in Oxford, UK, in December 2018. The 28 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 119 submissions. The papers reflect the work of researchers in theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, and microeconomics who have joined forces to tackle problems at the intersection of computation, game theory and economics.