A law of large numbers for weighted majority

DOI10.1016/J.AAM.2005.08.002zbMATH Open1142.60006arXivmath/0406509OpenAlexW1992614642MaRDI QIDQ864871FDOQ864871

Authors: Olle Häggström, Gil Kalai, Elchanan Mossel 

Publication date: 13 February 2007

Published in: Advances in Applied Mathematics (Search for Journal in Brave)

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.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0406509

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zbMATH Keywords

law of large numbersvoting paradoxBoolean functionsvoting powerinfluencesaggregation of informationmonotone simple games

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Central limit and other weak theorems (60F05) Combinatorial probability (60C05) Voting theory (91B12)

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Cited In (9)

• Social Indeterminacy
• The prediction value
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• Correlation, partitioning and the probability of casting a decisive vote under the majority rule
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• “One Man, One Vote” Part 1: Electoral Justice in the U.S. Electoral College: Banzhaf and Shapley/Shubik Versus May

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