Reaching Consensus Under a Deadline

Group decisions are often complicated by a deadline. For example, in committee hiring decisions, the deadline might be a budget's start date or the beginning of a semester. 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. Hence, committee members might prefer to agree on a reasonable, rather than the best, candidate, to avoid unfilled positions. Here, we propose a model for the above scenario-Consensus Under a Deadline (CUD)-based on a time-bounded iterative voting process. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees and an analysis of the resulting decision quality. 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 human voters, concluding that it may often be best to have bots play on the humans' behalf.