scispace - formally typeset
Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

Junta distributions and the average-case complexity of manipulating elections

TLDR
It is shown that scoring protocols are susceptible to manipulation by coalitions, when the number of candidates is constant, and it is demonstrated that NP-hard manipulations may be tractable in the average-case.
Abstract
Encouraging voters to truthfully reveal their preferences in an election has long been an important issue. Recently, computational complexity has been suggested as a means of precluding strategic behavior. Previous studies have shown that some voting protocols are hard to manipulate, but used NP-hardness as the complexity measure. Such a worst-case analysis may be an insufficient guarantee of resistance to manipulation. Indeed, we demonstrate that NP-hard manipulations may be tractable in the average-case. For this purpose, we augment the existing theory of average-case complexity with some new concepts. In particular, we consider elections distributed with respect to junta distributions, which concentrate on hard instances. We use our techniques to prove that scoring protocols are susceptible to manipulation by coalitions, when the number of candidates is constant.

read more

Content maybe subject to copyright    Report

Citations
More filters
BookDOI

Handbook of Computational Social Choice

TL;DR: This handbook, written by thirty-six prominent members of the computational social choice community, covers the field comprehensively and offers detailed introductions to each of the field's major themes.
Journal ArticleDOI

Llull and Copeland voting computationally resist bribery and constructive control

TL;DR: Among systems with a polynomial-time winner problem, Copeland voting is the first natural election system proven to have full resistance to constructive control and vulnerability results for microbribery are proven via a novel technique involving min-cost network flow.
Journal ArticleDOI

AI’s War on Manipulation: Are We Winning?

TL;DR: An overview of more than two decades of work that studies computational complexity as a barrier against manipulation in elections is provided.
Journal ArticleDOI

How hard is bribery in elections

TL;DR: This work obtains both polynomial-time bribery algorithms and proofs of the intractability of bribery, and results show that the complexity of bribery is extremely sensitive to the setting.
Journal ArticleDOI

Using complexity to protect elections

TL;DR: Computational complexity may truly be the shield against election manipulation.
References
More filters
Book

The Probabilistic Method

Joel Spencer
TL;DR: A particular set of problems - all dealing with “good” colorings of an underlying set of points relative to a given family of sets - is explored.
Journal ArticleDOI

Strategy-proofness and Arrow's conditions: Existence and correspondence theorems for voting procedures and social welfare functions

TL;DR: In this paper, the strategy-proofness condition for voting procedures corresponds to Arrow's rationality, independence of irrelevant alternatives, nonnegative response, and citizens' sovereignty conditions for social welfare functions.
Journal ArticleDOI

The computational difficulty of manipulating an election

TL;DR: A voting rule is exhibited that efficiently computes winners but is computationally resistant to strategic manipulation, showing how computational complexity might protect the integrity of social choice.
Related Papers (5)