{"id":{"repo_id":"uiuc","oai_identifier":"oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/50344"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/uiuc/oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/50344","repository":{"repo_id":"uiuc","name":"University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign","base_url":"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh"},"display":{"title":"Generalized multi-peaked model of electoral preferences","abstract":"Individuals often need to make decisions as a group on di erent levels, ranging from a family unit, to professional organizations, to larger political and economic units. Societies choose their leaders, while companies gain business insights and develop marketing strategies using aggregation methods. These decisions are highly resource-intensive and have important implications for the quality of life, safety, and self-expression in public life. Therefore, it is extremely important to aggregate individual preferences correctly. The area of theoretical Social Choice provides us with bearish answers that a consensus may be unobtainable and that any group choice may be impugnable. Even worse, the choice of the best option may depend on the choice of the aggregation procedure. Nevertheless, the analysis of real-world data routinely argues against these theoretical predictions: the outcomes of aggregation procedures in real-world data sets agree remarkably well. This contradiction has puzzled researchers for decades. To solve this puzzle I propose a Generalized Multi-peaked model of preferences. The Multi-peaked model is consistent with the predictions from the theoretical literature on Social Choice and with the novel empirical evidence. I model the structure of group preferences by assuming that, first, people share a limited number of points of view and, therefore, form subgroups on the basis of similar preferences. Thus, the distribution of preferences of the group is a mixture of the preferences of these subgroups. Second, within a group, people deviate slightly from a typical point of view and thereby provide a variety of opinions. I capture these two assumptions by introducing modes, i.e., true/typical points of view of a group, and Kernel functions, i.e., deviations from the modes, into the model. I show that Kernel functions bear all the responsibility for the high rates of consistency among aggregation methods, as well as the rarity of cyclical social preferences in real-world data.","abstract_html":"Individuals often need to make decisions as a group on di erent levels, ranging from a family unit, to professional organizations, to larger political and economic units. Societies choose their leaders, while companies gain business insights and develop marketing strategies using aggregation methods. These decisions are highly resource-intensive and have important implications for the quality of life, safety, and self-expression in public life. Therefore, it is extremely important to aggregate individual preferences correctly. The area of theoretical Social Choice provides us with bearish answers that a consensus may be unobtainable and that any group choice may be impugnable. Even worse, the choice of the best option may depend on the choice of the aggregation procedure. Nevertheless, the analysis of real-world data routinely argues against these theoretical predictions: the outcomes of aggregation procedures in real-world data sets agree remarkably well. This contradiction has puzzled researchers for decades. To solve this puzzle I propose a Generalized Multi-peaked model of preferences. The Multi-peaked model is consistent with the predictions from the theoretical literature on Social Choice and with the novel empirical evidence. I model the structure of group preferences by assuming that, first, people share a limited number of points of view and, therefore, form subgroups on the basis of similar preferences. Thus, the distribution of preferences of the group is a mixture of the preferences of these subgroups. Second, within a group, people deviate slightly from a typical point of view and thereby provide a variety of opinions. I capture these two assumptions by introducing modes, i.e., true/typical points of view of a group, and Kernel functions, i.e., deviations from the modes, into the model. I show that Kernel functions bear all the responsibility for the high rates of consistency among aggregation methods, as well as the rarity of cyclical social preferences in real-world data.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Popova, Anna"],"institution":"University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign","degree_name":"Ph.D.","degree_level":"Dissertation","degree_discipline":"Psychology","degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Regenwetter, Michel","Chang, Hua-Hua","Hubert, Lawrence J.","Kuklinski, James H.","Milenkovic, Olgica"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2014,"date_issued":"2014-09-16T17:11:51Z","date_published":"2014-09-16T17:11:51Z","updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:25:40Z","subjects":["Social choice","Group choice","Condorcet paradox","aggregation of preferences"],"languages":["en"],"rights":["Copyright 2014 Anna Popova"],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"http://hdl.handle.net/2142/50344","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Regenwetter, Michel","Chang, Hua-Hua","Hubert, Lawrence J.","Kuklinski, James H.","Milenkovic, Olgica"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Popova, Anna"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2014-09-16T17:11:51Z","2016-09-22T20:59:25Z","2014-08","2014-09-16"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["text"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_discipline","label":"Discipline","values":["Psychology"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_level","label":"Degree Level","values":["Dissertation"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_name","label":"Degree Name","values":["Ph.D."]},{"key":"thesis:institution_name","label":"Thesis Institution Name","values":["University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["Social choice","Group choice","Condorcet paradox","aggregation of preferences"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["en"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["Copyright 2014 Anna Popova"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["http://hdl.handle.net/2142/50344"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description","label":"Description","values":["Individuals often need to make decisions as a group on di erent levels, ranging from a family unit, to professional organizations, to larger political and economic units. Societies choose their leaders, while companies gain business insights and develop marketing strategies using aggregation methods. These decisions are highly resource-intensive and have important implications for the quality of life, safety, and self-expression in public life. Therefore, it is extremely important to aggregate individual preferences correctly. The area of theoretical Social Choice provides us with bearish answers that a consensus may be unobtainable and that any group choice may be impugnable. Even worse, the choice of the best option may depend on the choice of the aggregation procedure. Nevertheless, the analysis of real-world data routinely argues against these theoretical predictions: the outcomes of aggregation procedures in real-world data sets agree remarkably well. This contradiction has puzzled researchers for decades. To solve this puzzle I propose a Generalized Multi-peaked model of preferences. The Multi-peaked model is consistent with the predictions from the theoretical literature on Social Choice and with the novel empirical evidence. I model the structure of group preferences by assuming that, first, people share a limited number of points of view and, therefore, form subgroups on the basis of similar preferences. Thus, the distribution of preferences of the group is a mixture of the preferences of these subgroups. Second, within a group, people deviate slightly from a typical point of view and thereby provide a variety of opinions. I capture these two assumptions by introducing modes, i.e., true/typical points of view of a group, and Kernel functions, i.e., deviations from the modes, into the model. I show that Kernel functions bear all the responsibility for the high rates of consistency among aggregation methods, as well as the rarity of cyclical social preferences in real-world data.","Item withdrawn by Laura Spradlin (lspradl2@illinois.edu) on 2014-06-27T16:48:18Z Item was in collections: University of Illinois Theses & Dissertations (ID: 1) No. of bitstreams: 2 Popova_Anna.tex: 524230 bytes, checksum: ef21e47f467714f3527cd8132a64d2e9 (MD5) Popova_Anna.pdf: 32770089 bytes, checksum: 0432df1a80b7a339c842d15a763ee261 (MD5)","Made available in DSpace on 2014-09-16T17:11:51Z (GMT). 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Societies choose their leaders, while companies gain business insights and develop marketing strategies using aggregation methods. These decisions are highly resource-intensive and have important implications for the quality of life, safety, and self-expression in public life. Therefore, it is extremely important to aggregate individual preferences correctly. The area of theoretical Social Choice provides us with bearish answers that a consensus may be unobtainable and that any group choice may be impugnable. Even worse, the choice of the best option may depend on the choice of the aggregation procedure. Nevertheless, the analysis of real-world data routinely argues against these theoretical predictions: the outcomes of aggregation procedures in real-world data sets agree remarkably well. This contradiction has puzzled researchers for decades. To solve this puzzle I propose a Generalized Multi-peaked model of preferences. The Multi-peaked model is consistent with the predictions from the theoretical literature on Social Choice and with the novel empirical evidence. I model the structure of group preferences by assuming that, first, people share a limited number of points of view and, therefore, form subgroups on the basis of similar preferences. Thus, the distribution of preferences of the group is a mixture of the preferences of these subgroups. Second, within a group, people deviate slightly from a typical point of view and thereby provide a variety of opinions. I capture these two assumptions by introducing modes, i.e., true/typical points of view of a group, and Kernel functions, i.e., deviations from the modes, into the model. 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