63 research outputs found
Computational Aspects of Nearly Single-Peaked Electorates
Manipulation, bribery, and control are well-studied ways of changing the
outcome of an election. Many voting rules are, in the general case,
computationally resistant to some of these manipulative actions. However when
restricted to single-peaked electorates, these rules suddenly become easy to
manipulate. Recently, Faliszewski, Hemaspaandra, and Hemaspaandra studied the
computational complexity of strategic behavior in nearly single-peaked
electorates. These are electorates that are not single-peaked but close to it
according to some distance measure.
In this paper we introduce several new distance measures regarding
single-peakedness. We prove that determining whether a given profile is nearly
single-peaked is NP-complete in many cases. For one case we present a
polynomial-time algorithm. In case the single-peaked axis is given, we show
that determining the distance is always possible in polynomial time.
Furthermore, we explore the relations between the new notions introduced in
this paper and existing notions from the literature.Comment: Published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR).
A short version of this paper appeared in the proceedings of the
Twenty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2013). An
even earlier version appeared in the proceedings of the Fourth International
Workshop on Computational Social Choice 2012 (COMSOC 2012
Structure in Dichotomous Preferences
Many hard computational social choice problems are known to become tractable
when voters' preferences belong to a restricted domain, such as those of
single-peaked or single-crossing preferences. However, to date, all algorithmic
results of this type have been obtained for the setting where each voter's
preference list is a total order of candidates. The goal of this paper is to
extend this line of research to the setting where voters' preferences are
dichotomous, i.e., each voter approves a subset of candidates and disapproves
the remaining candidates. We propose several analogues of the notions of
single-peaked and single-crossing preferences for dichotomous profiles and
investigate the relationships among them. We then demonstrate that for some of
these notions the respective restricted domains admit efficient algorithms for
computationally hard approval-based multi-winner rules.Comment: A preliminary version appeared in the proceedings of IJCAI 2015, the
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligenc
Are there any nicely structured preference~profiles~nearby?
We investigate the problem of deciding whether a given preference profile is
close to having a certain nice structure, as for instance single-peaked,
single-caved, single-crossing, value-restricted, best-restricted,
worst-restricted, medium-restricted, or group-separable profiles. We measure
this distance by the number of voters or alternatives that have to be deleted
to make the profile a nicely structured one. Our results classify the problem
variants with respect to their computational complexity, and draw a clear line
between computationally tractable (polynomial-time solvable) and
computationally intractable (NP-hard) questions
The Complexity of Fully Proportional Representation for Single-Crossing Electorates
We study the complexity of winner determination in single-crossing elections
under two classic fully proportional representation
rules---Chamberlin--Courant's rule and Monroe's rule. Winner determination for
these rules is known to be NP-hard for unrestricted preferences. We show that
for single-crossing preferences this problem admits a polynomial-time algorithm
for Chamberlin--Courant's rule, but remains NP-hard for Monroe's rule. Our
algorithm for Chamberlin--Courant's rule can be modified to work for elections
with bounded single-crossing width. To circumvent the hardness result for
Monroe's rule, we consider single-crossing elections that satisfy an additional
constraint, namely, ones where each candidate is ranked first by at least one
voter (such elections are called narcissistic). For single-crossing
narcissistic elections, we provide an efficient algorithm for the egalitarian
version of Monroe's rule.Comment: 23 page
Campaign Management under Approval-Driven Voting Rules
Approval-like voting rules, such as Sincere-Strategy Preference-Based
Approval voting (SP-AV), the Bucklin rule (an adaptive variant of -Approval
voting), and the Fallback rule (an adaptive variant of SP-AV) have many
desirable properties: for example, they are easy to understand and encourage
the candidates to choose electoral platforms that have a broad appeal. In this
paper, we investigate both classic and parameterized computational complexity
of electoral campaign management under such rules. We focus on two methods that
can be used to promote a given candidate: asking voters to move this candidate
upwards in their preference order or asking them to change the number of
candidates they approve of. We show that finding an optimal campaign management
strategy of the first type is easy for both Bucklin and Fallback. In contrast,
the second method is computationally hard even if the degree to which we need
to affect the votes is small. Nevertheless, we identify a large class of
scenarios that admit fixed-parameter tractable algorithms.Comment: 34 pages, 1 figur
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