2,960 research outputs found
The Complexity of Online Manipulation of Sequential Elections
Most work on manipulation assumes that all preferences are known to the
manipulators. However, in many settings elections are open and sequential, and
manipulators may know the already cast votes but may not know the future votes.
We introduce a framework, in which manipulators can see the past votes but not
the future ones, to model online coalitional manipulation of sequential
elections, and we show that in this setting manipulation can be extremely
complex even for election systems with simple winner problems. Yet we also show
that for some of the most important election systems such manipulation is
simple in certain settings. This suggests that when using sequential voting,
one should pay great attention to the details of the setting in choosing one's
voting rule. Among the highlights of our classifications are: We show that,
depending on the size of the manipulative coalition, the online manipulation
problem can be complete for each level of the polynomial hierarchy or even for
PSPACE. We obtain the most dramatic contrast to date between the
nonunique-winner and unique-winner models: Online weighted manipulation for
plurality is in P in the nonunique-winner model, yet is coNP-hard (constructive
case) and NP-hard (destructive case) in the unique-winner model. And we obtain
what to the best of our knowledge are the first P^NP[1]-completeness and
P^NP-completeness results in the field of computational social choice, in
particular proving such completeness for, respectively, the complexity of
3-candidate and 4-candidate (and unlimited-candidate) online weighted coalition
manipulation of veto elections.Comment: 24 page
Tacit Lobbying Agreements: An Experimental Study
We experimentally study the common wisdom that money buys political influence. In the game, one lobbyist has the opportunity to influence redistributive tax policies in her favor by transferring money to two competing candidates. The success of the lobbying investment depends on whether or not the candidates are willing to respond and able to collude on low-tax policies that do not harm their relative chances in the elections. In the experiment, we find that lobbying is never successful when the lobbyist and candidates interact just once. By contrast, it yields substantially lower redistribution in about 40% of societies with finitely-repeated encounters. However, lobbying investments are not always profitable, and profit-sharing between the lobbyist and candidates depends on prominent equity norms. Our experimental results shed new light on the complex process of buying political influence in everyday politics and help explain why only relatively few corporate firms do actually lobby.lobbying, redistribution, elections, bargaining, collusion
Tacit Lobbying Agreements: An Experimental Study
We experimentally study the common wisdom that money buys political influence. In the game, one lobbyist has the opportunity to influence redistributive tax policies in her favor by transferring money to two competing candidates. The success of the lobbying investment depends on whether or not the candidates are willing to respond and able to collude on low-tax policies that do not harm their relative chances in the elections. In the experiment, we find that lobbying is never successful when the lobbyist and candidates interact just once. By contrast, it yields substantially lower redistribution in about 40% of societies with finitely-repeated encounters. However, lobbying investments are not always profitable, and profit-sharing between the lobbyist and candidates depends on prominent equity norms. Our experimental results shed new light on the complex process of buying political influence in everyday politics and help explain why only relatively few corporate firms do actually lobby.lobbying, redistribution, elections, bargaining, collusion
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