16 research outputs found
Resolving the Complexity of Some Fundamental Problems in Computational Social Choice
This thesis is in the area called computational social choice which is an
intersection area of algorithms and social choice theory.Comment: Ph.D. Thesi
Parameterized Algorithmics for Computational Social Choice: Nine Research Challenges
Computational Social Choice is an interdisciplinary research area involving
Economics, Political Science, and Social Science on the one side, and
Mathematics and Computer Science (including Artificial Intelligence and
Multiagent Systems) on the other side. Typical computational problems studied
in this field include the vulnerability of voting procedures against attacks,
or preference aggregation in multi-agent systems. Parameterized Algorithmics is
a subfield of Theoretical Computer Science seeking to exploit meaningful
problem-specific parameters in order to identify tractable special cases of in
general computationally hard problems. In this paper, we propose nine of our
favorite research challenges concerning the parameterized complexity of
problems appearing in this context
On the Exact Amount of Missing Information that Makes Finding Possible Winners Hard
We consider election scenarios with incomplete information, a situation that arises often in practice. There are several models of incomplete information and accordingly, different notions of outcomes of such elections. In one well-studied model of incompleteness, the votes are given by partial orders over the candidates. In this context we can frame the problem of finding a possible winner, which involves determining whether a given candidate wins in at least one completion of a given set of partial votes for a specific voting rule.
The Possible Winner problem is well-known to be NP-Complete in general, and it is in fact known to be NP-Complete for several voting rules where the number of undetermined pairs in every vote is bounded only by some constant. In this paper, we address the question of determining precisely the smallest number of undetermined pairs for which the Possible Winner problem remains NP-Complete. In particular, we find the exact values of t for which the Possible Winner problem transitions to being NP-Complete from being in P, where t is the maximum number of undetermined pairs in every vote. We demonstrate tight results for a broad subclass of scoring rules which includes all the commonly used scoring rules (such as plurality, veto, Borda, and k-approval), Copeland^alpha for every alpha in [0,1], maximin, and Bucklin voting rules. A somewhat surprising aspect of our results is that for many of these rules, the Possible Winner problem turns out to be hard even if every vote has at most one undetermined pair of candidates
Manipulating Districts to Win Elections: Fine-Grained Complexity
Gerrymandering is a practice of manipulating district boundaries and
locations in order to achieve a political advantage for a particular party.
Lewenberg, Lev, and Rosenschein [AAMAS 2017] initiated the algorithmic study of
a geographically-based manipulation problem, where voters must vote at the
ballot box closest to them. In this variant of gerrymandering, for a given set
of possible locations of ballot boxes and known political preferences of
voters, the task is to identify locations for boxes out of possible
locations to guarantee victory of a certain party in at least districts.
Here integers and are some selected parameter.
It is known that the problem is NP-complete already for 4 political parties
and prior to our work only heuristic algorithms for this problem were
developed. We initiate the rigorous study of the gerrymandering problem from
the perspectives of parameterized and fine-grained complexity and provide
asymptotically matching lower and upper bounds on its computational complexity.
We prove that the problem is W[1]-hard parameterized by and that it does
not admit an algorithm for any function of
and only, unless Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) fails. Our lower
bounds hold already for parties. On the other hand, we give an algorithm
that solves the problem for a constant number of parties in time
.Comment: Presented at AAAI-2
10101 Abstracts Collection -- Computational Foundations of Social Choice
From March 7 to March 12, 2010, the Dagstuhl Seminar 10101
``Computational Foundations of Social Choice \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics.
During the seminar, several participants presented their current
research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of
the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section
describes the seminar topics and goals in general.
Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available
A deep exploration of the complexity border of strategic voting problems
Voting has found applications in a variety of areas. Unfortunately, in a voting activity there may exist strategic individuals who have incentives to attack the election by performing some strategic behavior. One possible way to address this issue is to use computational complexity as a barrier against the strategic behavior. The point is that if it is NP-hard to successfully perform a strategic behavior, the strategic individuals may give up their plan of attacking the election.
This thesis is concerned with strategic behavior in restricted elections, in the sense that the given elections are subject to some combinatorial restrictions. The goal is to find out how the complexity of the strategic behavior changes from the very restricted case to the general case.Abstimmungen werden auf verschiedene Gebiete angewendet. Leider kann es bei einer Abstimmung einzelne Teilnehmer geben, die Vorteile daraus ziehen, die Wahl durch strategisches Verhalten zu manipulieren. Eine Möglichkeit diesem Problem zu begegnen ist es, die Berechnungskomplexität als Hindernis gegen strategisches Verhalten zu nutzen. Die Annahme ist, dass falls es NP-schwer ist, um strategisches Verhalten erfolgreich anzuwenden, der strategisch Handelnde vielleicht den Plan aufgibt die Abstimmung zu attackieren.
Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit strategischem Vorgehen in eingeschränkten Abstimmungen in dem Sinne, dass die vorgegebenen Abstimmungen kombinatorischen Einschränkungen unterliegen. Ziel ist es herauszufinden, wie sich die Komplexität des strategischen Handelns von dem sehr eingeschränkten zu dem generellen Fall ändert
Towards a Dichotomy for the Possible Winner Problem in Elections Based on Scoring Rules
To make a joint decision, agents (or voters) are often required to provide
their preferences as linear orders. To determine a winner, the given linear
orders can be aggregated according to a voting protocol. However, in realistic
settings, the voters may often only provide partial orders. This directly leads
to the Possible Winner problem that asks, given a set of partial votes, whether
a distinguished candidate can still become a winner. In this work, we consider
the computational complexity of Possible Winner for the broad class of voting
protocols defined by scoring rules. A scoring rule provides a score value for
every position which a candidate can have in a linear order. Prominent examples
include plurality, k-approval, and Borda. Generalizing previous NP-hardness
results for some special cases, we settle the computational complexity for all
but one scoring rule. More precisely, for an unbounded number of candidates and
unweighted voters, we show that Possible Winner is NP-complete for all pure
scoring rules except plurality, veto, and the scoring rule defined by the
scoring vector (2,1,...,1,0), while it is solvable in polynomial time for
plurality and veto.Comment: minor changes and updates; accepted for publication in JCSS, online
version available