Special Topics in Systems Engineering: Modeling and Design of Social Choice Systems

3 units

Social choice systems are all around us, from how we decide to split the check to who becomes president. This course introduces many conceptual and computational problems in the study of systems of social choice and offers a variety of tools to understand them. We will consider both micro and macro social choice systems; for the latter drawing on modern statistical techniques to understand (and reframe) questions like what is a fair map of congressional districts? In order to address modeling and design challenges in social choice systems we will explore mathematical and software tools such as game theory, linear optimization, Monte Carlo / MCMC methods, and geographical data representation in Python.