Agent-Mediated Social Choice
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Computational studies of voting are mostly motivated by two intended applications: the coordination of societies of artificial agents, and the study of human collective decisions whose complexity requires the use of computational techniques. Both research directions are too often confined to theoretical studies, with unrealistic assumptions constraining their significance for real-world situations. Most practical applications of these results are therefore confined to low-stakes decisions, which are of great importance in expanding the use of algorithms in society, but are far from high-stakes choices such as political elections, referenda, or parliamentary decisions, which societies still make using old-fashioned technologies like paper ballots. In this paper I argue in favour of conceiving "voting avatars", artificial agents that are able to act as proxies for voters in collective decisions at any level of society. Besides being an ideal test-bed for a large number of techniques developed in the field of multiagent systems and artificial intelligence in general, agent-mediated social choice may also suggests innovative solutions to the low voter participation that is endemic in most practical implementations of electronic decision processes.
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