# Reaching Consensus Under a Deadline

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a model for committee decision-making under deadlines, analyzing how iterative voting can lead to consensus and exploring behavioral differences among voters through experiments and user studies.

## Contribution

It proposes the CUD model for deadline-constrained consensus, providing convergence guarantees and analyzing voter behavior impacts.

## Key findings

- CUD model guarantees convergence to a decision.
- Behavioral differences affect decision quality.
- Bots can effectively simulate voter behavior.

## Abstract

Committee decisions are complicated by a deadline, e.g., the next start of a budget, or the beginning of a semester. In committee hiring decisions, it may be that if no candidate is supported by a strong majority, the default is to hire no one - an option that may cost dearly. As a result, committee members might prefer to agree on a reasonable, if not necessarily the best, candidate, to avoid unfilled positions. In this paper, we propose a model for the above scenario - Consensus Under a Deadline (CUD)- based on a time-bounded iterative voting process. We provide convergence guarantees and an analysis of the quality of the final decision. An extensive experimental study demonstrates more subtle features of CUDs, e.g., the difference between two simple types of committee member behavior, lazy vs.~proactive voters. Finally, a user study examines the differences between the behavior of rational voting bots and real voters, concluding that it may often be best to have bots play on the voters' behalf.