305 research outputs found
Deterministic, Strategyproof, and Fair Cake Cutting
We study the classic cake cutting problem from a mechanism design
perspective, in particular focusing on deterministic mechanisms that are
strategyproof and fair. We begin by looking at mechanisms that are non-wasteful
and primarily show that for even the restricted class of piecewise constant
valuations there exists no direct-revelation mechanism that is strategyproof
and even approximately proportional. Subsequently, we remove the non-wasteful
constraint and show another impossibility result stating that there is no
strategyproof and approximately proportional direct-revelation mechanism that
outputs contiguous allocations, again, for even the restricted class of
piecewise constant valuations. In addition to the above results, we also
present some negative results when considering an approximate notion of
strategyproofness, show a connection between direct-revelation mechanisms and
mechanisms in the Robertson-Webb model when agents have piecewise constant
valuations, and finally also present a (minor) modification to the well-known
Even-Paz algorithm that has better incentive-compatible properties for the
cases when there are two or three agents.Comment: A shorter version of this paper will appear at IJCAI 201
Reinstating Combinatorial Protections for Manipulation and Bribery in Single-Peaked and Nearly Single-Peaked Electorates
Understanding when and how computational complexity can be used to protect
elections against different manipulative actions has been a highly active
research area over the past two decades. A recent body of work, however, has
shown that many of the NP-hardness shields, previously obtained, vanish when
the electorate has single-peaked or nearly single-peaked preferences. In light
of these results, we investigate whether it is possible to reimpose NP-hardness
shields for such electorates by allowing the voters to specify partial
preferences instead of insisting they cast complete ballots. In particular, we
show that in single-peaked and nearly single-peaked electorates, if voters are
allowed to submit top-truncated ballots, then the complexity of manipulation
and bribery for many voting rules increases from being in P to being
NP-complete.Comment: 28 pages; A shorter version of this paper will appear at the 30th
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16
Computational Aspects of Strategic Behaviour in Elections with Top-Truncated Ballots
Understanding when and how computational complexity can be used to protect elections against different manipulative actions has been a highly active research area over the past two decades. Much of this literature, however, makes the assumption that
the voters or agents specify a complete preference ordering over the set of candidates. There are many multiagent systems applications, and even real-world elections, where this assumption is not warranted, and this in turn raises a series of questions on the impact of partial voting on the complexity of manipulative actions. In this thesis, we focus on two of these questions. First, we address the question of how hard it is to manipulate elections when the agents specify only top-truncated ballots. Here, in particular, we look at the weighted manipulation problem---both constructive and destructive manipulation---when the voters are allowed to specify top-truncated ballots, and we provide general results for all scoring rules, for elimination versions of all scoring rules, for the plurality with runoff rule, for a family of election systems known as Copeland^α, and for the maximin protocol. Subsequently, we also look at the impact on complexity of manipulation when there is uncertainty about the non-manipulators' votes. The second question we address is the question on what the impact of top-truncated voting is on the complexity of manipulative actions in electorates with structured preference profiles. In particular, we consider electorates that are single-peaked or nearly single-peaked and we show how, for many voting protocols, allowing top-truncated voting reimposes the NP-hardness shields that normally vanish in such electorates
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