Research Interests

My current research is in Voting Theory and involves exploiting some of the geometric interpretations developed by Don Saari at UC-Irvine. The basic problem arises when there are more than two candidates in an election. Depending on which procedure you use to determine the winner, you can get dramatically different outcomes, even if no one changes their preferences.

In addition to the obvious applications to political science, there are also applications turning up in some very surprising areas, including computational biology and computer science. The main appeal for me is that there is some really interesting mathematics involved which has the added bonus of being comparatively accessible to undergraduates.

My most recent work has focused on the problem of electing committees where voters have preferences for the overall composition of the committee that cannot be reduced to preferences on individual candidates. There are the twin problems of developing reasonable means for voters to express their preferences without giving a complete ranking of all possible committees and of determining an appropriate decision procedure based on these preferences.

By training, I am an algebraic topologist. My dissertation dealt with elliptic cohomology theories, and I did some work on the stable splittings of classifying spaces of finite groups.

Research Publications

• "Selecting committees", Public Choice, Vol 126 (2006), pp 343-355.

• "Some startling inconsistencies when electing committees", Social Choice and Welfare, Vol 21, Num 3 (2003), pp 433-454.

• "A comparison of Dodgson's method and the Borda count", Economic Theory, Vol 20, Num 2 (2002), pp 357-372.

• "A comparison of Dodgson's method and Kemeny's rule", Social Choice and Welfare, Vol 18, Num 1 (2001), pp 79-89.