Voting in social networks

A voting system is a set of rules that a community adopts to take collective decisions. In this paper we study voting systems for a particular kind of community: electronically mediated social networks. In particular, we focus on delegative democracy (a.k.a. proxy voting) that has recently received increased interest for its ability to combine the benefits of direct and representative systems, and that seems also perfectly suited for electronically mediated social networks. In such a context, we consider a voting system in which users can only express their preference for one among the people they are explicitly connected with, and this preference can be propagated transitively, using an attenuation factor. We present this system and we study its properties. We also take into consideration the problem of missing votes, which is particularly relevant in online networks, as some recent case shows. Our experiments on real-world networks provide interesting insight into the significance and stability of the results obtained with the suggested voting system.

[1]  J. Seeley.  The net of reciprocal influence; a problem in treating sociometric data. , 1949 .

[2]  L. A. Goodman,et al.  Social Choice and Individual Values , 1951 .

[3]  Leo Katz,et al.  A new status index derived from sociometric analysis , 1953 .

[4]  David Austen-Smith,et al.  Monotonicity in Electoral Systems , 1991, American Political Science Review.

[5]  Richard S. Katz,et al.  Democracy and elections , 1997 .

[6]  Rajeev Motwani,et al.  The PageRank Citation Ranking : Bringing Order to the Web , 1999, WWW 1999.

[7]  M E J Newman,et al.  Community structure in social and biological networks , 2001, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[8]  Jennifer Widom,et al.  Scaling personalized web search , 2003, WWW '03.

[9]  Ramanathan V. Guha,et al.  Propagation of trust and distrust , 2004, WWW '04.

[10]  Sebastiano Vigna,et al.  PageRank as a function of the damping factor , 2005, WWW '05.

[11]  Dongwon Lee,et al.  On six degrees of separation in DBLP-DB and more , 2005, SGMD.

[12]  Emin Gün Sirer,et al.  Fighting peer-to-peer SPAM and decoys with object reputation , 2005, P2PECON '05.

[13]  H. Yamakawa,et al.  Toward Delegated Democracy: Vote by Yourself, or Trust Your Network , 2007 .

[14]  Johan Bollen,et al.  Smartocracy: Social Networks for Collective Decision Making , 2007, 2007 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'07).

[15]  G. O'Donell.  Delegative Democracy , 2008 .

[16]  Lakshminarayanan Subramanian,et al.  Sybil-Resilient Online Content Voting , 2009, NSDI.

[17]  Jennifer Golbeck,et al.  Computing with Social Trust , 2008, Human-Computer Interaction Series.