EAGER: Changing Minds, Changing Probabilities

我们建议正式考虑到预期的行为，外源事件和影响的影响，以及信念修改的心理影响，所有的概率推理的背景下，群体决策的数学模型。 我们有兴趣建立模型，足以让我们深入了解人类和计算偏好聚集和投票过程。例如，我们希望利用日益增长的关于社交网络和投票的政治科学工作，建立反映选民之间复杂人际影响的投票模型。 我们希望在政治学、心理学和决策科学文献中探索信念变化的工作，以便在我们的模型中包括人类回归早期信念的倾向。这项工作的智力价值在于随机环境中群体决策和影响理论的数学形式化;这些模型与政治学文献中的模型相一致;群体决策中影响力随机模型的计算复杂性分析，以及在这种情况下影响和阻止影响的算法。这项工作涉及NSF的第三个更广泛的影响类别：“加强研究和教育的基础设施。计算社会选择领域通常被认为始于Bartholdi，Tovey和Trick 1989年在《社会选择与福利》杂志上发表的论文。 然而，计算机科学家注意到它的速度非常慢，它在政治学中也没有引起多少初步的关注。 即使是现在，政治科学家和计算机科学家之间关于“社会选择”的合作甚至沟通都是有限的。 我们将承担跨学科研究的挑战性任务，试图了解问题陈述，目标和研究机构的结果。 我们看到SIGECOM在支持算法计算机科学、复杂性理论和经济学的跨学科工作方面取得了巨大成功。 我们希望将这种互动水平带到社会选择研究领域。

We propose to formalize mathematical models of group decision making that take into account expected behaviors, the effects of exogenous events and influences, and the psychological effects of belief modifications, all in the context of probabilistic reasoning. We are interested in building models sufficient to give us insight into both human and computational preference aggregation and voting processes. For instance, we want to leverage the growing political science work on social networks and voting to build models of voting that reflect complex interpersonal influence between voters. We want to explore work on belief changes in the political science, psychology, and decision sciences literature to include in our models the human tendency to revert to earlier-held beliefs.The intellectual merit of this work lies in the mathematical formalization of theories of group decision making and influence in a stochastic setting; the alignment of such models with those from the political science literature; computational complexity analysis of stochastic models of influence in group decision making, and algorithms for influencing and blocking influence in such settings.This work addresses NSF's third broader impacts category: "Enhance infrastructure for research and education." The field of computational social choice is often said to have begun with Bartholdi, Tovey, and Trick's 1989 paper in the journal Social Choice and Welfare. However, computer scientists were very slow to notice it, and it generated little initial attention in political science. Even now, cooperation and even communication between political and computer scientists about "social choice'" is limited. We will take on the challenging task of interdisciplinary research, attempting to understand problem statements, goals, and results from both bodies of research. We have seen great success by SIGECOM in supporting interdisciplinary work in algorithmic computer science, complexity theory, and economics. We hope to bring that level of interaction to the social choice research areas.