Voting with rank dependent scoring rules

Positional scoring rules in voting compute the score of an al-ternative by summing the scores for the alternative induced by every vote. This summation principle ensures that all votes contribute equally to the score of an alternative. We relax this assumption and, instead, aggregate scores by taking into ac-count the rank of a score in the ordered list of scores ob-tained from the votes. This defines a new family of voting rules, rank-dependent scoring rules (RDSRs), based on or-dered weighted average (OWA) operators, which include all scoring rules and Olympic averages, among others. We study some properties of these rules, and show, empirically, that certain RDSRs are less manipulable than Borda voting, across a variety of statistical cultures