The voting system a government chooses has influence upon the way people vote, as it has some bearing on the average person’s utility received from voting. In the United States the Electoral College system is used to determine who becomes president-elect, but theoretical arguments have been made to support a change in voting structure to Proportional Representation. I developed my model to understand more about how a change in the voting structure would affect voter utility. My contribution to the research question focuses upon relative benefits of one voter in a specific party to another voter in another party. I used an empirical approach, using data pulled from past elections and survey data. My model suggests that Republican voters would receive a higher utility from a change in the voting system from the Electoral College to Proportional Representation. It is unclear whether Democrats would receive a higher benefit, but at least would receive a lesser utility change than that of the Republican voters.

無論在電腦動畫、電玩或電影產業，利用電腦自動產生虛擬人群已逐漸成為不可或缺的要素之一。這些虛擬人群，往往是系統先賦與每個虛擬代理人(agent)基礎智能，然後藉由個體之間的互動法則所自動產生。然而，過去因為普遍未考量真實群體情境中的傳播與互動模式，使得虛擬人群所表現的群體行為與現實情況仍有些差距。因此，我們引用社會心理學文獻，建立一個具有溝通機制的人群模擬平台(IMCrowd)，以期自動產生與現實群眾動態更相似的模擬人群。IMCrowd是多代理人(Multi-agent)基礎的系統，其中每個虛擬代理人都具有區域的感知範圍與自主能力，因此他們能夠自動地與環境中的其它物件互動與反應。由於我們為IMCrowd所建立的溝通模型考量了社會心理學的理論，因此虛擬人群能浮現真實群體動態中的社會互動模式，如情緒傳染與從眾效應。本研究以IMCrowd執行了多種情境下群眾暴動與群眾控制的模擬，藉此展現本系統的應用將不僅可提升群體模擬的真實度，亦可做為社會心理學家研究群體行為的工具。 / Using computer to automatically generate simulated crowd has become a trend in animation, computer game, and film productions. Many of these works were produced by modeling the intelligence of the agents in a crowd and their interactions with other nearby agents and the environment. However, the perceived facts or elicited emotions usually do not propagate in the crowd as they should in the real life. In this work we attempt to build up a communication model to simulate a large variety of crowd behaviors including the course of crowd formation. The proposed crowd simulation system, IMCrowd, has been implemented with a multi-agent system in which each agent has a local perception and autonomous abilities to improvise their actions. The algorithms used in our communication model in IMCrowd are based heavily on sociology research. Therefore, the collective behaviors will emerge out of the social process such as emotion contagion and conformity effect among individual agents. Several elaborate riot simulations and riot control simulations are demonstrated and reported in this thesis as the application examples of IMCrowd. Thus, we claim that IMCrowd may not only benefit on enhancing realism of crowd animation but also be useful in studying crowd behaviors such as panic, gathering, and riots.