Publications related to Empirical Evidence on the Effectiveness of Shareholder Democracy

Robust Sparse Voting

Rachid Guerraoui, Le Nguyen Hoang, Youssef Allouah, Oscar Jean Olivier Villemaud

Many applications, such as content moderation and recommendation, require reviewing and scoring a large number of alternatives. Doing so robustly is however very challenging. Indeed, voters' inputs are inevitably sparse: most alternatives are only scored b ...

2024

International Portfolio Choice with Frictions: Evidence from Mutual Funds

Simon Tièche

Using data on international equity portfolio allocations by U.S. mutual funds, we estimate a portfolio expression derived from a standard mean-variance portfolio model extended with portfolio frictions. The optimal portfolio depends on the previous month a ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC2023

Predicting party switching through machine learning and open data

Silvestro Micera, Emanuele Rossi

Parliament dynamics might seem erratic at times. Predicting future voting patterns could support policy design based on the simulation of voting scenarios. The availability of open data on legislative activities and machine learning tools might enable such ...

CELL PRESS2023

Discrete-Choice Mining of Social Processes

Victor Kristof

Poor decisions and selfish behaviors give rise to seemingly intractable global problems, such as the lack of transparency in democratic processes, the spread of conspiracy theories, and the rise in greenhouse gas emissions. However, people are more predict ...

EPFL2021

Technologizing Democracy or Democratizing Technology? A Layered-Architecture Perspective on Potentials and Challenges

Bryan Alexander Ford

While technology is often claimed to be “democratizing”, the technologizing of society has more often yielded undemocratic or even anti-democratic outcomes. Is technology fundamentally at odds with democracy, or is it merely a rich and infinitely-adaptable ...

University of Chicago Press2021

The probability of intransitivity in dice and close elections

Jan Hazla

We study the phenomenon of intransitivity in models of dice and voting. First, we follow a recent thread of research for n-sided dice with pairwise ordering induced by the probability, relative to 1/2, that a throw from one die is higher than the other. We ...

2020

The Distortion of Distributed Voting

Aris Filos Ratsikas

Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the voting process on the ...

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG2019

The geographic evolution of political cleavages in Switzerland: A network approach to assessing levels and dynamics of polarization between local populations

Shin Alexandre Koseki

Scholarly studies and common accounts of national politics enjoy pointing out the resilience of ideological divides among populations. Building on the image of political cleavages and geographic polarization, the regionalization of politics has become a tr ...

2018

Online Collaborative Prediction of Regional Vote Results

Patrick Thiran, Matthias Grossglauser, Vincent Etter, Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan

We consider online predictions of vote results, where regions across a country vote on an issue under discussion. Such online predictions before and during the day of the vote are useful to media agencies, polling institutes, and political parties, e.g., t ...

IEEE2016

The total benefit of alternative assets to pension fund portfolios

Anna Slavutskaya

Pension funds only quite recently have explored alternative assets, prodded by financial crises that devastated equity returns and led to low bond returns. We assess the addition of alternative assets to pension fund portfolios in terms of the total benefi ...

Elsevier Science Bv2016

Rule of Thumb – Effect of Social Button Icons on Interaction

Denis Gillet, Samuel Bendahan, Andrii Vozniuk, Adrian Christian Holzer

Social buttons are now widespread in social media apps. They are used to assign weight to user content and trigger user engagement. They come in different shapes (e.g., thumb in Facebook, arrows in Reddit or StackOverflow, plus one in Google+) but very lit ...

2016

Signaling and Self-regulation in Venture Capital : Evidence from Investments in the Clean Technology Sector

Giovanni Liotta

This thesis proposes three studies that provide novel empirical evidence on how different types of VCs' characteristics signal the quality of an entrepreneurial venture and influence investment strategies of funds subject to self-regulation. In the first s ...

EPFL2016

Combine and Conquer : Mining Social Systems for Prediction

Vincent Etter

In this thesis, we explore the application of data mining and machine learning techniques to several practical problems. These problems have roots in various fields such as social science, economics, and political science. We show that computer science tec ...

EPFL2015

Mining Democracy

Patrick Thiran, Matthias Grossglauser, Vincent Etter, Julien Pierre Sacha Herzen

Switzerland has a long tradition of direct democracy, which makes it an ideal laboratory for research on real-world politics. Similar to recent open government initiatives launched worldwide, the Swiss government regularly releases datasets related to stat ...

2014

Institutional Investors and Mutual Fund Governance: Evidence from Retail-Institutional Fund Twins

Rüdiger Fahlenbrach

Advisors often manage multiple versions of a fund. These "twins" have the same manager and similar performance but are sold to different investors with differing abilities to select and monitor managers. Comparing investor flows in retail and institutional ...

Oxford University Press2012

L’espace-Obama : une victoire des réseaux sur les territoires

Jacques Lévy, Luc Guillemot

Spatial characteristics are more relevant than socio-economic features to distinguish Romney and Obama’s electoral bodies. A cartographic representation at county level that uses a population cartogram as a base map makes the opposition between both geogra ...

Association Espaces Temps2012

Evaluation of Atlas Fusion Strategies for Segmentation of Head and Neck Lymph Nodes for Radiotherapy Planning

Jean-Philippe Thiran, Meritxell Bach Cuadra, Subrahmanyam Venkata Ravi Mohana Sai Gorthi

Accurate segmentation of lymph nodes in head and neck (H&N) CT images is essential for the radiotherapy planning of the H&N cancer. Atlas-based segmentation methods are widely used for the automated segmentation of such structures. Multi-atlas approaches a ...

Ieee2012

Fusion of Multi-Atlas Segmentations with Spatial Distribution Modeling

Jean-Philippe Thiran, Meritxell Bach Cuadra, Subrahmanyam Venkata Ravi Mohana Sai Gorthi

In recent years, multi-atlas fusion methods have gained significant attention in medical image segmentation. In this paper, we propose a general Markov Random Field (MRF) based framework that can perform edge-preserving smoothing of the labels at the time ...

2011

The Distributed Multiple Voting Problem

Patrick Thiran, Martin Vetterli, Florence Bénézit

A networked set of agents holding binary opinions does not seem to be able to compute its majority opinion by means of local binary interactions only. However, the majority problem can be solved using two or more bits, instead of one [1]. Pairs of agents a ...

2011

Mutual fund portfolio choice in the presence of dynamic ﬂows

Julien Hugonnier

We analyze the implications of dynamic flows on a mutual fund's portfolio decisions. In our model, myopic investors dynamically allocate capital between a riskless asset and an actively managed fund which charges fraction-of-fund fees. The presence of dyna ...

2010