Distant Truth: Bias Under Vote Distortion Costs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, there has been increasing interest within the computational social choice community regarding models where voters are biased towards specific behaviors or have secondary preferences. An important representative example of this approach is the model of truth bias, where voters prefer to be honest about their preferences, unless they are pivotal. This model has been demonstrated to be an effective tool in controlling the set of pure Nash equilibria in a voting game, which otherwise lacks predictive power. However, in the models that have been used thus far, the bias is binary, i.e., the final utility of a voter depends on whether he cast a truthful vote or not, independently of the type of lie. In this paper, we introduce a more robust framework, and eliminate this limitation, by investigating truth-biased voters with variable bias strength. Namely, we assume that even when voters face incentives to lie towards a better outcome, the ballot distortion from their truthful preference incurs a cost, measured by a distance function. We study various such distance-based cost functions and explore their effect on the set of Nash equilibria of the underlying game. Intuitively, one might expect that such distance metrics may induce similar behavior. To our surprise, we show that the presented metrics exhibit quite different equilibrium behavior.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".