skip to main content
research-article

How to Put Through Your Agenda in Collective Binary Decisions

Published: 05 January 2016 Publication History

Abstract

We consider the following decision-making scenario: a society of voters has to find an agreement on a set of proposals, and every single proposal is to be accepted or rejected. Each voter supports a certain subset of the proposals—the favorite ballot of this voter—and opposes the remaining ones. He accepts a ballot if he supports more than half of the proposals in this ballot. The task is to decide whether there exists a ballot approving a specified number of selected proposals (agenda) such that all voters (or a strict majority of them) accept this ballot.
We show that, on the negative side, both problems are NP-complete, and on the positive side, they are fixed-parameter tractable with respect to the total number of proposals or with respect to the total number of voters. We look into further natural parameters and study their influence on the computational complexity of both problems, thereby providing both tractability and intractability results. Furthermore, we provide tight combinatorial bounds on the worst-case size of an accepted ballot in terms of the number of voters.

References

[1]
Noga Alon and Kenneth A. Berman. 1986. Regular hypergraphs, Gordon’s lemma, Steinitz’ lemma and invariant theory. Journal of Combinatorial Theory. Series A 43, 1 (1986), 91--97.
[2]
Noga Alon, Robert Bredereck, Jiehua Chen, Stefan Kratsch, Rolf Niedermeier, and Gerhard J. Woeginger. 2013a. How to put through your agenda in collective binary decisions. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory (LNCS), Vol. 8176. Springer, 30--44.
[3]
Noga Alon, Dvir Falik, Reshef Meir, and Moshe Tennenholtz. 2013b. Bundling attacks in judgment aggregation. In Proceedings of the 27th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Press, 39--45.
[4]
Noga Alon and Van H. Vu. 1997. Anti-Hadamard matrices, coin weighing, threshold gates, and indecomposable hypergraphs. Journal of Combinatorial Theory. Series A 79, 1 (1997), 133--160.
[5]
Haris Aziz, Serge Gaspers, (Hans) Joachim Gudmundsson, Simon Mackenzie, Nicholas Mattei, and Toby Walsh. 2014. Computational aspects of multi-winner approval voting. In Proceedings of the 8th Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling. 7.
[6]
Dorothea Baumeister, Gábor Erdélyi, Olivia Johanna Erdélyi, and Jörg Rothe. 2013. Computational aspects of manipulation and control in judgment aggregation. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory (LNCS), Vol. 8176. Springer, 71--85.
[7]
Dorothea Baumeister, Gábor Erdélyi, and Jörg Rothe. 2011. How hard is it to bribe the judges? A study of the complexity of bribery in judgment aggregation. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory (LNCS), Vol. 6992. Springer, 1--15.
[8]
Nadja Betzler, Robert Bredereck, Jiehua Chen, and Rolf Niedermeier. 2012. Studies in computational aspects of voting—A parameterized complexity perspective. In The Multivariate Algorithmic Revolution and Beyond (LNCS), Vol. 7370. Springer, 318--363.
[9]
Nadja Betzler, Arkadii Slinko, and Johannes Uhlmann. 2013. On the computation of fully proportional representation. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 47 (2013), 475--519.
[10]
Daniel Binkele-Raible, Gábor Erdélyi, Henning Fernau, Judy Goldsmith, Nicholas Mattei, and Jörg Rothe. 2014. The complexity of probabilistic lobbying. Discrete Optimization 11 (2014), 1--21.
[11]
Robert Bredereck, Jiehua Chen, Piotr Faliszewski, Jiong Guo, Rolf Niedermeier, and Gerhard J. Woeginger. 2014a. Parameterized algorithmics for computational social choice: Nine research challenges. Tsinghua Science and Technology 19 (2014), 358--373.
[12]
Robert Bredereck, Jiehua Chen, Sepp Hartung, Stefan Kratsch, Rolf Niedermeier, Ondrej Suchý, and Gerhard J. Woeginger. 2014b. A multivariate complexity analysis of lobbying in multiple referenda. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 50 (2014), 409--446.
[13]
John R. Chamberlin and Paul N. Courant. 1983. Representative deliberations and representative decisions: Proportional representation and the Borda rule. American Political Science Review 77, 3 (1983), 718--733.
[14]
Robin Christian, Mike Fellows, Frances Rosamond, and Arkadii Slinko. 2007. On complexity of lobbying in multiple referenda. Review of Economic Design 11, 3 (2007), 217--224.
[15]
Vincent Conitzer, Jérôme Lang, and Lirong Xia. 2009. How hard is it to control sequential elections via the agenda? In Proceedings of the 21st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Press, San Francisco, CA, 103--108.
[16]
Tuğçe Çuhadaroğlu and Jean Lainé. 2012. Pareto efficiency in multiple referendum. Theory and Decision 72, 4 (2012), 525--536.
[17]
Michael Dom, Daniel Lokshtanov, and Saket Saurabh. 2014. Kernelization lower bounds through colors and IDs. ACM Transactions on Algorithms 11, 2, Article 13 (2014), 20 pages.
[18]
Rodney G. Downey and Michael R. Fellows. 2013. Fundamentals of Parameterized Complexity. Springer.
[19]
Edith Elkind, Jérôme Lang, and Abdallah Saffidine. 2011. Choosing collectively optimal sets of alternatives based on the Condorcet criterion. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Press, 186--191.
[20]
Ulle Endriss, Umberto Grandi, and Daniele Porello. 2012. Complexity of judgment aggregation. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 45 (2012), 481--514.
[21]
Gábor Erdélyi, Lane A. Hemaspaandra, Jörg Rothe, and Holger Spakowski. 2007. On approximating optimal weighted lobbying, and frequency of correctness versus average-case polynomial time. In Proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Fundamentals of Computation Theory (LNCS), Vol. 4639. Springer, Berlin, 300--311.
[22]
Michael R. Fellows, Jörg Flum, Danny Hermelin, Moritz Müller, and Frances A. Rosamond. 2010. W-hierarchies defined by symmetric gates. Theory of Computing Systems 46, 2 (2010), 311--339.
[23]
Michael R. Fellows, Bart M. P. Jansen, and Frances A. Rosamond. 2013. Towards fully multivariate algorithmics: Parameter ecology and the deconstruction of computational complexity. European Journal of Combinatorics 34, 3 (2013), 541--566.
[24]
Peter C. Fishburn and Aleksandar S. Pekeč. 2004. Approval voting for Committees: Threshold Approaches. Technical Report. Available at http://people.duke.edu/∼pekec/Publications/CommitteeVotePekecFishburn.pdf.
[25]
Jörg Flum and Martin Grohe. 2006. Parameterized Complexity Theory. Springer.
[26]
András Frank and Éva Tardos. 1987. An application of simultaneous diophantine approximation in combinatorial optimization. Combinatorica 7, 1 (1987), 49--65.
[27]
Michael R. Garey and David S. Johnson. 1979. Computers and Intractability—A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness. W. H. Freeman and Company.
[28]
Jack E. Graver. 1973. A survey of the maximum depth problem for indecomposable exact covers. In Infinite and Finite Sets, Colloquia Mathematica Societatis János Bolyai, Vol. 10. North-Holland, 731--743.
[29]
Jiong Guo and Rolf Niedermeier. 2007. Invitation to data reduction and problem kernelization. ACM SIGACT News 38, 1 (2007), 31--45.
[30]
Jiong Guo, Rolf Niedermeier, and Sebastian Wernicke. 2007. Parameterized complexity of vertex cover variants. Theory of Computing Systems 41, 3 (2007), 501--520.
[31]
Jacque Hadamard. 1893. Résolution d’une question relative aux déterminants. Bulletin des Sciences Mathématiques 17 (1893), 240--246.
[32]
Danny Hermelin, Stefan Kratsch, Karolina Soltys, Magnus Wahlström, and Xi Wu. 2015. A completeness theory for polynomial (Turing) kernelization. Algorithmica 71, 3 (2015), 702--730.
[33]
Ravi Kannan. 1987. Minkowski’s convex body theorem and integer programming. Mathematics of Operations Research 12, 3 (1987), 415--440.
[34]
D. Marc Kilgour. 2010. Approval balloting for multi-winner elections. In Handbook on Approval Voting. Springer, 105--124.
[35]
D. Marc Kilgour and Erica Marshall. 2012. Approval balloting for fixed-size committees. In Electoral Systems. Springer, 305--326.
[36]
Stefan Kratsch. 2014. Recent developments in kernelization: A survey. Bulletin of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science 113 (2014), 58--97.
[37]
Gilbert Laffond and Jean Lainé. 2009. Condorcet choice and the Ostrogorski paradox. Social Choice and Welfare 32, 2 (2009), 317--333.
[38]
Gilbert Laffond and Jean Lainé. 2012. Searching for a compromise in multiple referendum. Group Decision and Negotiation 21, 4 (2012), 551--569.
[39]
Hendrik W. Lenstra. 1983. Integer programming with a fixed number of variables. Mathematics of Operations Research 8, 4 (1983), 538--548.
[40]
Tyler Lu and Craig Boutilier. 2011. Budgeted social choice: From consensus to personalized decision making. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Press, 280--286.
[41]
Meena Mahajan and Venkatesh Raman. 1999. Parameterizing above guaranteed values: MaxSat and maxcut. Journal of Algorithms 31, 2 (1999), 335--354.
[42]
Burt L. Monroe. 1995. Fully proportional representation. American Political Science Review 89, 4 (1995), 925--940.
[43]
Rolf Niedermeier. 2006. Invitation to Fixed-Parameter Algorithms. Oxford University Press.
[44]
Rolf Niedermeier. 2010. Reflections on multivariate algorithmics and problem parameterization. In Proceedings of the 27th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS’10) (LIPIcs), Vol. 5. Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, 17--32.
[45]
Richard F. Potthoff and Steven J. Brams. 1998. Proportional representation: Broadening the options. Journal of Theoretical Politics 10, 2 (1998), 147--178.
[46]
Ariel D. Procaccia, Jeffrey S. Rosenschein, and Aviv Zohar. 2008. On the complexity of achieving proportional representation. Social Choice and Welfare 30, 3 (2008), 353--362.
[47]
S. V. Sevastyanov. 1978. On approximate solutions of scheduling problems. Metody Discretnogo Analiza 32 (1978), 66--75 (in Russian).
[48]
Piotr Skowron, Piotr Faliszewski, and Jérôme Lang. 2015. Finding a collective set of items: From proportional multirepresentation to group recommendation. In Proceedings of the 29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Press, 2131--2137.
[49]
Piotr Skowron, Piotr Faliszewski, and Arkadii M. Slinko. 2013a. Achieving fully proportional representation is easy in practice. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. 399--406.
[50]
Piotr Skowron, Piotr Faliszewski, and Arkadii M. Slinko. 2013b. Fully proportional representation as resource allocation: Approximability results. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Press, 353--359.
[51]
Joel H. Spencer. 1985. Six standard deviations suffice. Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 289, 2 (1985), 679--706.
[52]
Douglas B. West. 2001. Introduction to Graph Theory (2nd. ed.). Prentice Hall.

Cited By

View all

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation
ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation  Volume 4, Issue 1
December 2015
169 pages
ISSN:2167-8375
EISSN:2167-8383
DOI:10.1145/2852252
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 05 January 2016
Accepted: 01 January 2015
Revised: 01 November 2014
Received: 01 June 2014
Published in TEAC Volume 4, Issue 1

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Collective binary decision making
  2. approval balloting with majority threshold
  3. control by proposal bundling
  4. voting on multiple issues

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed

Funding Sources

  • USA-Israeli BSF
  • Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes
  • DIAMANT
  • DFG
  • ERC
  • ISF
  • Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
  • I-Core

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)6
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
Reflects downloads up to 04 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Full Access

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media