A law of large numbers for weighted majority

Olle Häggström*, Gil Kalai, Elchanan Mossel

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Consider an election between two candidates in which the voters' choices are random and independent and the probability of a voter choosing the first candidate is p > 1 / 2. Condorcet's Jury Theorem which he derived from the weak law of large numbers asserts that if the number of voters tends to infinity then the probability that the first candidate will be elected tends to one. The notion of influence of a voter or its voting power is relevant for extensions of the weak law of large numbers for voting rules which are more general than simple majority. In this paper we point out two different ways to extend the classical notions of voting power and influences to arbitrary probability distributions. The extension relevant to us is the "effect" of a voter, which is a weighted version of the correlation between the voter's vote and the election's outcomes. We prove an extension of the weak law of large numbers to weighted majority games when all individual effects are small and show that this result does not apply to any voting rule which is not based on weighted majority.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)112-123
Number of pages12
JournalAdvances in Applied Mathematics
Volume37
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2006

Keywords

  • Aggregation of information
  • Boolean functions
  • Influences
  • Law of large numbers
  • Monotone simple games
  • Voting paradox
  • Voting power

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