Kernelization complexity of possible winner and coalitional manipulation problems in voting

Dey, Palash and Misra, Neeldhara and Narahari, Y (2016) Kernelization complexity of possible winner and coalitional manipulation problems in voting. In: THEORETICAL COMPUTER SCIENCE, 616 . pp. 111-125.

PDF The_Com_Sci_616_111_2016.pdf - Published Version Restricted to Registered users only Download (480kB) | Request a copy

Abstract

In the POSSIBLE WINNER problem in computational social choice theory, we are given a set of partial preferences and the question is whether a distinguished candidate could be made winner by extending the partial preferences to linear preferences. Previous work has provided, for many common voting rules, fixed parameter tractable algorithms for the POSSIBLE WINNER problem, with number of candidates as the parameter. However, the corresponding kernelization question is still open and in fact, has been mentioned as a key research challenge 10]. In this paper, we settle this open question for many common voting rules. We show that the POSSIBLE WINNER problem for maximin, Copeland, Bucklin, ranked pairs, and a class of scoring rules that includes the Borda voting rule does not admit a polynomial kernel with the number of candidates as the parameter. We show however that the COALITIONAL MANIPULATION problem which is an important special case of the POSSIBLE WINNER problem does admit a polynomial kernel for maximin, Copeland, ranked pairs, and a class of scoring rules that includes the Borda voting rule, when the number of manipulators is polynomial in the number of candidates. A significant conclusion of our work is that the POSSIBLE WINNER problem is harder than the COALITIONAL MANIPULATION problem since the COALITIONAL MANIPULATION problem admits a polynomial kernel whereas the POSSIBLE WINNER problem does not admit a polynomial kernel. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	THEORETICAL COMPUTER SCIENCE
Publisher:	ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
Additional Information:	Copy right for this article belongs to the ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, PO BOX 211, 1000 AE AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS
Keywords:	Computational social choice; Possible winner; Voting; Kemelization; Parameterized complexity
Department/Centre:	Division of Electrical Sciences > Computer Science & Automation
Date Deposited:	29 Feb 2016 05:55
Last Modified:	29 Feb 2016 05:55
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/53300

Actions (login required)

View Item