Committee scoring voting rules are multiwinner analogues of positional scoring rules which constitute an important subclass of single-winner voting rules. We identify several natural subclasses of committee scoring rules, namely, weakly separable, representation-focused, top- @math -counting, OWA-based, and decomposable rules. We characterize SNTV, Bloc, and @math -Approval Chamberlin--Courant as the only nontrivial rules in pairwise intersections of these classes. We provide some axiomatic characterizations for these classes, where monotonicity properties appear to be especially useful. The class of decomposable rules is new to the literature. We show that it strictly contains the class of OWA-based rules and describe some of the applications of decomposable rules.
Naturally, there exist many interesting multiwinner rules beyond the class of committee scoring rules. These include, for example, Single Transferable Vote (see, e.g., the work of Tideman and Richardson @cite_29 ), a number of rules based on the Condorcet principle @cite_63 @cite_60 @cite_11 @cite_58 @cite_15 @cite_56 @cite_51 @cite_50 @cite_73 , Monroe's rule @cite_76 , and different variants of the rule invented by Phragm 'en @cite_32 @cite_87 @cite_40 @cite_82 @cite_4 . For an overview of electoral systems used to select committees of representatives in practice, we refer the reader to the book of Lijphart and Grofman @cite_71 .
@cite_4 @cite_73 @cite_60 @cite_87 @cite_82 @cite_29 @cite_76 @cite_32 @cite_56 @cite_40 @cite_63 @cite_50 @cite_71 @cite_15 @cite_58 @cite_51 @cite_11
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We characterize the class of committee scoring rules that satisfy the fixed-majority criterion. In some sense, the committee scoring rules in this class are multiwinner analogues of the single-winner Plurality rule, which is uniquely characterized as the only single-winner scoring rule that satisfies the simple majority criterion. We find that, for most of the rules in our new class, the complexity of winner determination is high (i.e., the problem of computing the winners is NP-hard), but we also show some examples of polynomial-time winner determination procedures, exact and approximate. Committee scoring rules form a rich class of aggregators of voters' preferences for the purpose of selecting subsets of objects with desired properties, e.g., a shortlist of candidates for an interview, a representative collective body such as a parliament, or a set of locations for a set of public facilities. In the spirit of celebrated Young's characterization result that axiomatizes single-winner scoring rules, we provide an axiomatic characterization of multiwinner committee scoring rules. We show that committee scoring rules---despite forming a remarkably general class of rules---are characterized by the set of four standard axioms, anonymity, neutrality, consistency and continuity, and by one axiom specific to multiwinner rules which we call committee dominance. In the course of our proof, we develop several new notions and techniques. In particular, we introduce and axiomatically characterize multiwinner decision scoring rules, a class of rules that broadly generalizes the well-known majority relation. We generalize the idea of a Condorcet winner to committee elections to select a Condorcet committee of size m. As in the case of a Condorcet winner, the Condorcet committee need not exist. We adapt two methods to measure how far a set of m candidates is from being the Condorcet committee. In particular, we generalize a procedure proposed by Lewis Carroll for selecting the candidate that is closest to being the Condorcet winner to allow the selection of a committee. We also generalize Kemeny’s method, which gives a complete transitive ranking, to the selection of committees and show that it is closely related to the first method.We show that these methods lead to some surprising inconsistencies. For example, the committee of size k may be disjoint from the committee of size j or they may overlap in any manner, the committee arising from Carroll’s method may appear at any locations in the Kemeny ranking, and except for two highly restrictive cases, the members of the committee arising from Kemeny’s method may appear at any location in the Kemeny ranking. The goal of this paper is to propose and study properties of multiwinner voting rules which can be consider as generalisations of single-winner scoring voting rules. We consider SNTV, Bloc, k-Borda, STV, and several variants of Chamberlin--Courant's and Monroe's rules and their approximations. We identify two broad natural classes of multiwinner score-based rules, and show that many of the existing rules can be captured by one or both of these approaches. We then formulate a number of desirable properties of multiwinner rules, and evaluate the rules we consider with respect to these properties. Given a set of voters V, a set of candidates C, and voters' preferences over the candidates, multiwinner voting rules output a fixed-size subset of candidates committee. Under the Chamberlin---Courant multiwinner voting rule, one fixes a scoring vector of length |C|, and each voter's 'utility' for a given committee is defined to be the score that she assigns to her most preferred candidate in that committee; the goal is then to find a committee that maximizes the joint utility of all voters. The joint utility is typically identified either with the sum of all voters' utilities or with the utility of the least satisfied voter, resulting in, respectively, the utilitarian and the egalitarian variant of the Chamberlin---Courant's rule. For both of these cases, the problem of computing an optimal committee is NP-hard for general preferences, but becomes polynomial-time solvable if voters' preferences are single-peaked or single-crossing. In this paper, we propose a family of multiwinner voting rules that are based on the concept of ordered weighted average OWA and smoothly interpolate between the egalitarian and the utilitarian variants of the Chamberlin---Courant rule. We show that under moderate constraints on the weight vector we can recover many of the algorithmic results known for the egalitarian and the utilitarian version of Chamberlin---Courant's rule in this more general setting. We investigate two systems of fully proportional representation suggested by Chamberlin & Courant and Monroe. Both systems assign a representative to each voter so that the "sum of misrepresentations" is minimized. The winner determination problem for both systems is known to be NP-hard, hence this work aims at investigating whether there are variants of the proposed rules and or specific electorates for which these problems can be solved efficiently. As a variation of these rules, instead of minimizing the sum of misrepresentations, we considered minimizing the maximal misrepresentation introducing effectively two new rules. In the general case these "minimax" versions of classical rules appeared to be still NP-hard. We investigated the parameterized complexity of winner determination of the two classical and two new rules with respect to several parameters. Here we have a mixture of positive and negative results: e.g., we proved fixed-parameter tractability for the parameter the number of candidates but fixed-parameter intractability for the number of winners. For single-peaked electorates our results are overwhelmingly positive: we provide polynomial-time algorithms for most of the considered problems. The only rule that remains NP-hard for single-peaked electorates is the classical Monroe rule. In computational social choice, one important problem is to take the votes of a subelectorate (subset of the voters), and summarize them using a small number of bits. This needs to be done in such a way that, if all that we know is the summary, as well as the votes of voters outside the subelectorate, we can conclude which of the m alternatives wins. This corresponds to the notion of compilation complexity, the minimum number of bits required to summarize the votes for a particular rule, which was introduced by [IJCAI-09]. We study three different types of compilation complexity. The first, studied by , depends on the size of the subelectorate but not on the size of the complement (the voters outside the subelectorate). The second depends on the size of the complement but not on the size of the subelectorate. The third depends on both. We first investigate the relations among the three types of compilation complexity. Then, we give upper and lower bounds on all three types of compilation complexity for the most prominent voting rules. We show that for l-approval (when l ≤ m 2), Borda, and Bucklin, the bounds for all three types are asymptotically tight, up to a multiplicative constant; for l-approval (when l > m 2), plurality with runoff, all Condorcet consistent rules that are based on unweighted majority graphs (including Copeland and voting trees), and all Condorcet consistent rules that are based on the order of pairwise elections (including ranked pairs and maximin), the bounds for all three types are asymptotically tight up to a multiplicative constant when the sizes of the subelectorate and its complement are both larger than m1+∊ for some ∊ > 0. We establish a link between multiwinner elections and apportionment problems by showing how approval-based multiwinner election rules can be interpreted as methods of apportionment. We consider several multiwinner rules and observe that they induce apportionment methods that are well-established in the literature on proportional representation. For instance, we show that Proportional Approval Voting induces the D'Hondt method and that Monroe's rule induces the largest reminder method. We also consider properties of apportionment methods and exhibit multiwinner rules that induce apportionment methods satisfying these properties. This paper is an axiomatic study of consistent approval-based multi-winner rules, i.e., voting rules that select a fixed-size group of candidates based on approval ballots. We introduce the class of counting rules, provide an axiomatic characterization of this class and, in particular, show that counting rules are consistent. Building upon this result, we axiomatically characterize three important consistent multi-winner rules: Proportional Approval Voting, Multi-Winner Approval Voting and the Approval Chamberlin--Courant rule. Our results demonstrate the variety of multi-winner rules and illustrate three different, orthogonal principles that multi-winner voting rules may represent: individual excellence, diversity, and proportionality. This paper establishes the computational complexity status for a problem of deciding on the quality of a committee. Starting with individual preferences over alternatives, we analyse when it can be determined efficiently if a given committee C satisfies a weak (resp. strong) Condorcet criterion–i.e., if C is at least as good as (resp. better than) every other committee in a pairwise majority comparison. Scoring functions used in classic voting rules are adapted for these comparisons. In particular, we draw the sharp separation line between computationally tractable and intractable instances with respect to different voting rules. Finally, we show that deciding if there exists a committee which satisfies the weak (resp. strong) Condorcet criterion is computationally hard. The voting rules proposed by Dodgson and Young are both designed to find an alternative closest to being a Condorcet winner, according to two different notions of proximity; the score of a given alternative is known to be hard to compute under either rule. In this paper, we put forward two algorithms for approximating the Dodgson score: a combinatorial, greedy algorithm and an LP-based algorithm, both of which yield an approximation ratio of H"m"-"1, where m is the number of alternatives and H"m"-"1 is the (m-1)st harmonic number. We also prove that our algorithms are optimal within a factor of 2, unless problems in NP have quasi-polynomial-time algorithms. Despite the intuitive appeal of the greedy algorithm, we argue that the LP-based algorithm has an advantage from a social choice point of view. Further, we demonstrate that computing any reasonable approximation of the ranking produced by Dodgson@?s rule is NP-hard. This result provides a complexity-theoretic explanation of sharp discrepancies that have been observed in the social choice theory literature when comparing Dodgson elections with simpler voting rules. Finally, we show that the problem of calculating the Young score is NP-hard to approximate by any factor. This leads to an inapproximability result for the Young ranking. We study the complexity of winner determination in single-crossing elections under two classic fully proportional representation rules-Chamberlin-Courant's rule and Monroe's rule. Winner determination for these rules is known to be NP-hard for unrestricted preferences. We show that for single-crossing preferences this problem admits a polynomial-time algorithm for Chamberlin-Courant's rule, but remains NP-hard for Monroe's rule. Our algorithm for Chamberlin-Courant's rule can be modified to work for elections with bounded single-crossing width. We then consider elections that are both single-peaked and single-crossing, and develop an efficient algorithm for the egalitarian variant of Monroe's rule for such elections. While [3] have recently presented a polynomial-time algorithm for this rule under single-peaked preferences, our algorithm has considerably better worst-case running time than that of Condorcet's principle of choosing the majority alternative whenever one exists is violated not only by Borda's rule but also by any scoring method; nevertheless, the essential property of scoring functions -- "consistency" of the outcome under aggregation of subgroups -- is shown to be compatible with Condorcet's principle. Moreover, these two properties, suitably interpreted, together with neutrality and the Pareto property, determine a unique rule known as Kemeny's rule. In 1977 Young proposed a voting scheme that extends the Condorcet Principle based on the fewest possible number of voters whose removal yields a Condorcet winner. We prove that both the winner and the ranking problem for Young elections is complete for || NP , the class of problems solvable in polynomial time by parallel access to NP. Analogous results for Lewis Carroll's 1876 voting scheme were recently established by In contrast, we prove that the winner and ranking problems in Fishburn's homogeneous variant of Carroll's voting scheme can be solved efficiently by linear programming. Abstract Recent studies have evaluated election procedures on their propensity to select committees that meet a Condorcet criterion. The Condorcet criterion has been defined to use majority agreement from voters' preferences to compare the selected committee to all other committees. This study uses a different definition of the Condorcet criterion as defined on committees. The focus of the new definition is on candidates. That is, we consider majority agreement on each candidate in the selected committee as compared to each candidate not in the selected committee. This new definition of the Condorcet criterion allows for the existence of majority cycles on candidates within the selected committee. However, no candidate in the non-selected group is able to defeat any candidate in the selected committee by majority rule. Of particular interest is the likelihood that a committee meeting this Condorcet criterion exists. Attention is also given to the likelihood that various simple voting procedures will select a committee meeting this Condorcet criterion when one does exist. 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 generalized scoring rules. We prove that under certain natural assumptions, if the number of manipulators is O(np) (for any p 1 2) and o(n), then the probability that a random profile 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. This paper investigates one of the possible weakening of the (too demanding) assumptions of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem. Namely we deal with a class of voting schemes where at the same time the domain of possible preference preordering of any agent is limited to single-peaked preferences, and the message that this agent sends to the central authority is simply its ‘peak’ — his best preferred alternative. In this context we have shown that strategic considerations justify the central role given to the Condorcet procedure which amounts to elect the ‘median’ peak: namely all strategy-proof anonymous and efficient voting schemes can be derived from the Condorcet procedure by simply adding some fixed ballots to the agent's ballots (with the only restriction that the number of fixed ballots is strictly less than the number of agents).