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158
Generalized scoring rules and the frequency of coalitional manipulability
- In Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC
, 2008
"... We introduce a class of voting rules called generalized scoring rules. Under such a rule, each vote generates a vector of k scores, and the outcome of the voting rule is based only on the sum of these vectors—more specifically, only on the order (in terms of score) of the sum’s components. This clas ..."
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Cited by 66 (20 self)
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We introduce a class of voting rules called generalized scoring rules. Under such a rule, each vote generates a vector of k scores, and the outcome of the voting rule is based only on the sum of these vectors—more specifically, only on the order (in terms of score) of the sum’s components. This class is extremely general: we do not know of any commonly studied rule that is not a generalized scoring rule. We then study the coalitional manipulation problem for gener-alized scoring rules. We prove that under certain natural assump-), then tions, if the number of manipulators is O(n p) (for any p < 1 2 the probability that a random profile is manipulable is O(n p − 1 2), where n is the number of voters. We also prove that under another set of natural assumptions, if the number of manipulators is Ω(n p) (for any p> 1) and o(n), then the probability that a random pro-2 file is manipulable (to any possible winner under the voting rule) is 1 − O(e −Ω(n2p−1)). We also show that common voting rules satisfy these conditions (for the uniform distribution). These results generalize earlier results by Procaccia and Rosenschein as well as even earlier results on the probability of an election being tied.
Determining possible and necessary winners under common voting rules given partial orders.
- In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI),
, 2008
"... Abstract Usually a voting rule requires agents to give their preferences as linear orders. However, in some cases it is impractical for an agent to give a linear order over all the alternatives. It has been suggested to let agents submit partial orders instead. Then, given a voting rule, a profile ..."
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Cited by 63 (11 self)
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Abstract Usually a voting rule requires agents to give their preferences as linear orders. However, in some cases it is impractical for an agent to give a linear order over all the alternatives. It has been suggested to let agents submit partial orders instead. Then, given a voting rule, a profile of partial orders, and an alternative (candidate) c, two important questions arise: first, is it still possible for c to win, and second, is c guaranteed to win? These are the possible winner and necessary winner problems, respectively. Each of these two problems is further divided into two sub-problems: determining whether c is a unique winner (that is, c is the only winner), or determining whether c is a co-winner (that is, c is in the set of winners). We consider the setting where the number of alternatives is unbounded and the votes are unweighted. We completely characterize the complexity of possible/necessary winner problems for the following common voting rules: a class of positional scoring rules (including Borda), Copeland, maximin, Bucklin, ranked pairs, voting trees, and plurality with runoff.
Llull and Copeland voting computationally resist bribery and control
, 2009
"... Control and bribery are settings in which an external agent seeks to influence the outcome of an election. Constructive control of elections refers to attempts by an agent to, via such actions as addition/deletion/partition of candidates or voters, ensure that a given candidate wins. Destructive con ..."
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Cited by 63 (30 self)
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Control and bribery are settings in which an external agent seeks to influence the outcome of an election. Constructive control of elections refers to attempts by an agent to, via such actions as addition/deletion/partition of candidates or voters, ensure that a given candidate wins. Destructive control refers to attempts by an agent to, via the same actions, preclude a given candidate’s victory. An election system in which an agent can sometimes affect the result and it can be determined in polynomial time on which inputs the agent can succeed is said to be vulnerable to the given type of control. An election system in which an agent can sometimes affect the result, yet in which it is NP-hard to recognize the inputs on which the agent can succeed, is said to be resistant to the given type of control. Aside from election systems with an NP-hard winner problem, the only systems previously known to be resistant to all the standard control types were highly artificial election systems created by hybridization. This paper studies a parameterized version of Copeland voting, denoted by Copeland α, where the parameter α is a rational number between 0 and 1 that specifies how ties are valued in the pairwise comparisons of candidates. In every previously studied constructive or destructive
AI’s war on manipulation: Are we winning?
- AI MAGAZINE
"... We provide an overview of more than two decades of work, mostly in AI, that studies computational complexity as a barrier against manipulation in elections. ..."
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Cited by 57 (9 self)
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We provide an overview of more than two decades of work, mostly in AI, that studies computational complexity as a barrier against manipulation in elections.
How Hard Is Bribery in Elections?
"... We study the complexity of influencing elections through bribery: How computationally complex is it for an external actor to determine whether by paying certain voters to change their preferences a specified candidate can be made the election’s winner? We study this problem for election systems as v ..."
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Cited by 56 (23 self)
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We study the complexity of influencing elections through bribery: How computationally complex is it for an external actor to determine whether by paying certain voters to change their preferences a specified candidate can be made the election’s winner? We study this problem for election systems as varied as scoring protocols and Dodgson voting, and in a variety of settings regarding homogeneous-vs.-nonhomogeneous electorate bribability, bounded-size-vs.-arbitrary-sized candidate sets, weighted-vs.-unweighted voters, and succinct-vs.-nonsuccinct input specification. We obtain both polynomial-time bribery algorithms and proofs of the intractability of bribery, and indeed our results show that the complexity of bribery is extremely sensitive to the setting. For example, we find settings in which bribery is NP-complete but manipulation (by voters) is in P, and we find settings in which bribing weighted voters is NP-complete but bribing voters with individual bribe thresholds is in P. For the broad class of elections (including plurality, Borda, k-approval, and veto) known as scoring protocols, we prove a dichotomy result for bribery of weighted voters: We find a simple-to-evaluate condition that classifies every case as either NP-complete or in P. 1.
Algorithms for the coalitional manipulation problem
- In The ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA
, 2008
"... We investigate the problem of coalitional manipulation in elections, which is known to be hard in a variety of voting rules. We put forward efficient algorithms for the problem in Scoring rules, Maximin and Plurality with Runoff, and analyze their windows of error. Specifically, given an instance on ..."
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Cited by 53 (8 self)
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We investigate the problem of coalitional manipulation in elections, which is known to be hard in a variety of voting rules. We put forward efficient algorithms for the problem in Scoring rules, Maximin and Plurality with Runoff, and analyze their windows of error. Specifically, given an instance on which an algorithm fails, we bound the additional power the manipulators need in order to succeed. We finally discuss the implications of our results with respect to the popular approach of employing computational hardness to preclude manipulation. 1
Copeland voting: Ties matter
- In To appear in Proceedings of AAMAS’08
, 2008
"... We study the complexity of manipulation for a family of election systems derived from Copeland voting via introducing a parameter α that describes how ties in head-to-head contests are valued. We show that the thus obtained problem of manipulation for unweighted Copeland α elections is NP-complete e ..."
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Cited by 51 (10 self)
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We study the complexity of manipulation for a family of election systems derived from Copeland voting via introducing a parameter α that describes how ties in head-to-head contests are valued. We show that the thus obtained problem of manipulation for unweighted Copeland α elections is NP-complete even if the size of the manipulating coalition is limited to two. Our result holds for all rational values of α such that 0 < α < 1 except for α = 1. Since it is 2 well known that manipulation via a single voter is easy for Copeland, our result is the first one where an election system originally known to be vulnerable to manipulation via a single voter is shown to be resistant to manipulation via a coalition of a constant number of voters. We also study the complexity of manipulation for Copeland α for the case of a constant number of candidates. We show that here the exact complexity of manipulation often depends closely on the α: Depending on whether we try to make our favorite candidate a winner or a unique winner and whether α is 0, 1 or between these values, the problem of weighted manipulation for Copeland α with three candidates is either in P or is NP-complete. Our results show that ways in which ties are treated in an election system, here Copeland voting, can be crucial to establishing complexity results for this system.
A sufficient condition for voting rules to be frequently manipulable
- In Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC
, 2008
"... The Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem states that (in unrestricted settings) any reasonable voting rule is manipulable. Recently, a quantitative version of this theorem was proved by Ehud Friedgut, Gil Kalai, and Noam Nisan: when the number of alternatives is three, for any neutral voting rule that is f ..."
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Cited by 45 (10 self)
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The Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem states that (in unrestricted settings) any reasonable voting rule is manipulable. Recently, a quantitative version of this theorem was proved by Ehud Friedgut, Gil Kalai, and Noam Nisan: when the number of alternatives is three, for any neutral voting rule that is far from any dictatorship, there exists a voter such that a random manipulation—that is, the true preferences and the strategic vote are all drawn i.i.d., uniformly at random—will succeed with a probability of Ω ( 1), where n is the n number of voters. However, it seems that the techniques used to prove this theorem can not be fully extended to more than three alternatives. In this paper, we give a more limited result that does apply to four or more alternatives. We give a sufficient condition for a voting rule to be randomly manipulable with a probability of Ω ( 1) for at least one voter, when the number of alternatives is held n fixed. Specifically, our theorem states that if a voting rule r satisfies 1. homogeneity, 2. anonymity, 3. non-imposition, 4. a cancelingout condition, and 5. there exists a stable profile that is still stable after one given alternative is uniformly moved to different positions; then there exists a voter such that a random manipulation for that voter will succeed with a probability of Ω ( 1). We show that n many common voting rules satisfy these conditions, for example any positional scoring rule, Copeland, STV, maximin, and ranked pairs.
The shield that never was: Societies with single-peaked preferences are more open to manipulation and control
- In Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge
, 2009
"... 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 fre ..."
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Cited by 42 (14 self)
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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. 1
