Maaike Venema-Los | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

On the Fragility of Majority Illusions

A majority illusion in a social network occurs when the majority of neighbors of an agent has a certain opinion while the majority of agents in the network has another opinion. We study the fragility of majority illusions, that is, whether illusions persist as a result of changes in the underlying network. We consider two settings. First, we study networks where agents have opinions that change over time and find that majority illusions disappear under majority updates. Second, we study sequences of large random graphs of which the size increases, and show that the likelihood of majority illusions goes to zero.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

Limited Voting for Better Representation?

Limited Voting (LV) is an approval-based method for multi-winner elections where all ballots are required to have a same fixed size. While it appears to be used as voting method in corporate governance and has some political applications, to the best of our knowledge, no formal analysis of the rule exists to date. We provide such an analysis here, prompted by a request for advice about this voting rule by a health insurance company in the Netherlands, which uses it to elect its work council. We study conditions under which LV would improve representation over standard approval voting and when it would not. We establish the extent of such an improvement, or lack thereof, both in terms of diversity and proportionality notions. These results help us understand if, and how, LV may be used as a low-effort fix of approval voting in order to enhance representation.

cs.GT↗