Social Rankings in Human-Computer Committees

Abstract

Despite committees and elections being widespread in thereal-world, the design of agents for operating in humancomputer committees has received far less attention than thetheoretical analysis of voting strategies. We address this gapby providing an agent design that outperforms other voters ingroups comprising both people and computer agents. In oursetting participants vote by simultaneously submitting a ranking over a set of candidates and the election system uses a social welfare rule to select a ranking that minimizes disagreements with participants’ votes. We ran an extensive studyin which hundreds of people participated in repeated votingrounds with other people as well as computer agents that differed in how they employ strategic reasoning in their votingbehavior. Our results show that over time, people learn todeviate from truthful voting strategies, and use heuristics toguide their play, such as repeating their vote from the previous round. We show that a computer agent using a bestresponse voting strategy was able to outperform people in thegame. Our study has implication for agent designers, highlighting the types of strategies that enable agents to succeedin committees comprising both human and computer participants. This is the first work to study the role of computeragents in voting settings involving both human and agent participants.