Control and bribery are settings in which an external agent seeks to influence the outcome of an election. Constructive control of elections refers to attempts by an agent to, via such actions as addition/deletion/partition of candidates or voters, ensure that a given candidate wins. Destructive

to control yet achieved by any nat-ural election system whose winner problem is in P. In addi-tion, we show that Llull and Copeland voting are very broadly resistant to bribery attacks, and we integrate the potential ir-rationality of voter preferences into many of our results.

Abstract. In voting theory, bribery is a form of manipulative behavior in which an external actor (the briber) offers to pay the voters to change their votes in order to get her preferred candidate elected. We investigate a model of bribery where the price of each vote depends on the amount

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We study the complexity of influencing elections through bribery: How computationally complex is it for an external actor to determine whether by a certain amount of bribing voters a specified candidate can be made the election’s winner? We study this problem for election systems as varied

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editorial assistance. The views in the paper are my own, and may not be shared by the World Bank, The Brookings Institution, or any other organization with which I am affiliated. 2“ there’s often a large amount of criminal activity. Corruption threatens growth and stability in many other ways as well: by discouraging business, undermining legal notions of property rights and perpetuating vested interests.”

Selectional constraints are limitations on the applicability of predicates to arguments. For example, the statement “The number two is blue” may be syntactically well formed, but at some level it is anomalous — BLUE is not a predicate that can be applied to numbers. According to the influential theory of (Katz and Fodor, 1964), a predicate associates a set of defining features with each argument, expressed within a restricted semantic vocabulary. Despite the persistence of this theory, however, there is widespread agreement about its empirical shortcomings (McCawley, 1968; Fodor, 1977). As an alternative, some critics of the Katz-Fodor theory (e.g. (Johnson-Laird, 1983)) have abandoned the treatment of selectional constraints as semantic, instead treating them as indistinguishable from inferences made on the basis of factual knowledge. This provides a better match for the empirical phenomena, but it opens up a different problem: if selectional constraints are the same as inferences in general, then accounting for them will require a much more complete understanding of knowledge representation and inference than we have at present. The problem, then, is this: how can a theory of selectional constraints be elaborated without first having either an empirically adequate theory of defining features or a comprehensive theory of inference? In this dissertation, I suggest that an answer to this question lies in the representation of conceptual

the assumption of a single-tier government underlying the Samuelson rule. The key …ndings are as follows: For small scale economies, bribery is predicted to be aimed at having an outsourcing contract persist even when public sector provision of the public good dominates (based on welfare and unit costs

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