97 research outputs found
The Shield that Never Was: Societies with Single-Peaked Preferences are More Open to Manipulation and Control
Much work has been devoted, during the past twenty years, to using complexity
to protect elections from manipulation and control. Many results have been
obtained showing NP-hardness shields, and recently there has been much focus on
whether such worst-case hardness protections can be bypassed by frequently
correct heuristics or by approximations. This paper takes a very different
approach: We argue that when electorates follow the canonical political science
model of societal preferences the complexity shield never existed in the first
place. In particular, we show that for electorates having single-peaked
preferences, many existing NP-hardness results on manipulation and control
evaporate.Comment: 38 pages, 2 figure
Modal Logics with Hard Diamond-free Fragments
We investigate the complexity of modal satisfiability for certain
combinations of modal logics. In particular we examine four examples of
multimodal logics with dependencies and demonstrate that even if we restrict
our inputs to diamond-free formulas (in negation normal form), these logics
still have a high complexity. This result illustrates that having D as one or
more of the combined logics, as well as the interdependencies among logics can
be important sources of complexity even in the absence of diamonds and even
when at the same time in our formulas we allow only one propositional variable.
We then further investigate and characterize the complexity of the
diamond-free, 1-variable fragments of multimodal logics in a general setting.Comment: New version: improvements and corrections according to reviewers'
comments. Accepted at LFCS 201
Complexity of Manipulative Actions When Voting with Ties
Most of the computational study of election problems has assumed that each
voter's preferences are, or should be extended to, a total order. However in
practice voters may have preferences with ties. We study the complexity of
manipulative actions on elections where voters can have ties, extending the
definitions of the election systems (when necessary) to handle voters with
ties. We show that for natural election systems allowing ties can both increase
and decrease the complexity of manipulation and bribery, and we state a general
result on the effect of voters with ties on the complexity of control.Comment: A version of this paper will appear in ADT-201
The Complexity of Computing Minimal Unidirectional Covering Sets
Given a binary dominance relation on a set of alternatives, a common thread
in the social sciences is to identify subsets of alternatives that satisfy
certain notions of stability. Examples can be found in areas as diverse as
voting theory, game theory, and argumentation theory. Brandt and Fischer [BF08]
proved that it is NP-hard to decide whether an alternative is contained in some
inclusion-minimal upward or downward covering set. For both problems, we raise
this lower bound to the Theta_{2}^{p} level of the polynomial hierarchy and
provide a Sigma_{2}^{p} upper bound. Relatedly, we show that a variety of other
natural problems regarding minimal or minimum-size covering sets are hard or
complete for either of NP, coNP, and Theta_{2}^{p}. An important consequence of
our results is that neither minimal upward nor minimal downward covering sets
(even when guaranteed to exist) can be computed in polynomial time unless P=NP.
This sharply contrasts with Brandt and Fischer's result that minimal
bidirectional covering sets (i.e., sets that are both minimal upward and
minimal downward covering sets) are polynomial-time computable.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figure
Very Hard Electoral Control Problems
It is important to understand how the outcome of an election can be modified
by an agent with control over the structure of the election. Electoral control
has been studied for many election systems, but for all studied systems the
winner problem is in P, and so control is in NP. There are election systems,
such as Kemeny, that have many desirable properties, but whose winner problems
are not in NP. Thus for such systems control is not in NP, and in fact we show
that it is typically complete for (i.e., , the
second level of the polynomial hierarchy). This is a very high level of
complexity. Approaches that perform quite well for solving NP problems do not
necessarily work for -complete problems. However, answer set
programming is suited to express problems in , and we present an
encoding for Kemeny control.Comment: A version of this paper will appear in the Proceedings of AAAI-201
More Natural Models of Electoral Control by Partition
"Control" studies attempts to set the outcome of elections through the
addition, deletion, or partition of voters or candidates. The set of benchmark
control types was largely set in the seminal 1992 paper by Bartholdi, Tovey,
and Trick that introduced control, and there now is a large literature studying
how many of the benchmark types various election systems are vulnerable to,
i.e., have polynomial-time attack algorithms for.
However, although the longstanding benchmark models of addition and deletion
model relatively well the real-world settings that inspire them, the
longstanding benchmark models of partition model settings that are arguably
quite distant from those they seek to capture.
In this paper, we introduce--and for some important cases analyze the
complexity of--new partition models that seek to better capture many real-world
partition settings. In particular, in many partition settings one wants the two
parts of the partition to be of (almost) equal size, or is partitioning into
more than two parts, or has groups of actors who must be placed in the same
part of the partition. Our hope is that having these new partition types will
allow studies of control attacks to include such models that more realistically
capture many settings
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