Incentives for participation and abstention in probabilistic social choice

Florian Brandl, Felix Brandt, Johannes Hofbauer

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

27 Scopus citations

Abstract

Voting rules are powerful tools that allow multiple agents to aggregate their preferences in order to reach joint decisions. A common flaw of some voting rules, known as the no-show paradox, is that agents may obtain a more preferred outcome by abstaining an election. Whenever a rule does not suffer from this paradox, it is said to satisfy participation. In this paper, we initiate the study of participation in probabilistic social choice, i.e., for voting rules that yield probability distributions over alternatives. We consider three degrees of participation based on expected utility, the strongest of which even requires that an agent is strictly better off by participating at an election. While the latter condition is prohibitive in non-probabilistic social choice, we show that it can be met by reasonable probabilistic functions. More generally, we study to which extent participation and Pareto efficiency are compatible. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in this direction.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAAMAS 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
EditorsRafael H. Bordini, Pinar Yolum, Edith Elkind, Gerhard Weiss
PublisherInternational Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS)
Pages1411-1419
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781450337717
StatePublished - 2015
Event14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2015 - Istanbul, Turkey
Duration: 4 May 20158 May 2015

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS
Volume3
ISSN (Print)1548-8403
ISSN (Electronic)1558-2914

Conference

Conference14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2015
Country/TerritoryTurkey
CityIstanbul
Period4/05/158/05/15

Keywords

  • No-show paradox
  • Pareto-optimality
  • Randomization
  • Stochastic dominance
  • Strategic manipulation
  • Voting theory

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