Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Awareness of Voter Passion Greatly Improves the Distortion of Metric Social Choice

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Web and Internet Economics (WINE 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11920))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

We develop new voting mechanisms for the case where voters and candidates are located in an arbitrary unknown metric space, and the goal is to choose a candidate minimizing social cost: the total distance of the voters to this candidate. Previous work has often assumed that only the ordinal preferences of the voters are known (instead of their true costs), and focused on minimizing distortion: the quality of the chosen candidate as compared to the best possible candidate. In this paper, we instead assume that a (very small) amount of information is known about the voter preference strengths, not just about their ordinal preferences. We provide mechanisms with much better distortion when this extra information is known as compared to mechanisms which use only ordinal information. We quantify tradeoffs between the amount of information known about preference strengths and the achievable distortion. We further provide advice about which type of information about preference strengths seems to be the most useful. Finally, we conclude by quantifying the ideal candidate distortion, which compares the quality of the chosen outcome with the best possible candidate that could ever exist, instead of only the best candidate that is actually in the running.

This work was partially supported by NSF award CCF-1527497.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 74.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    We focus on deterministic mechanisms in this paper; see Sect. 2 for a discussion of why.

References

  1. Amanatidis, G., Birmpas, G., Filos-Ratsikas, A., Voudouris, A.A.: Peeking behind the ordinal curtain: improving distortion via cardinal queries. arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.08165 (2019)

  2. Anshelevich, E., Bhardwaj, O., Elkind, E., Postl, J., Skowron, P.: Approximating optimal social choice under metric preferences. Artif. Intell. 264, 27–51 (2018)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  3. Anshelevich, E., Postl, J.: Randomized social choice functions under metric preferences. In: IJCAI (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Anshelevich, E., Zhu, W.: Ordinal approximation for social choice, matching, and facility location problems given candidate positions. In: WINE (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Arrow, K.: Advances in the Spatial Theory of Voting. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Benade, G., Itzhak, N., Shah, N., Procaccia, A.D., Gal, Y.: Efficiency and usability of participatory budgeting methods (2018, unpublished manuscript)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Benade, G., Nath, S., Procaccia, A.D., Shah, N.: Preference elicitation for participatory budgeting. In: AAAI (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Benade, G., Procaccia, A.D., Qiao, M.: Low-distortion social welfare functions. In: AAAI (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Bhaskar, U., Dani, V., Ghosh, A.: Truthful and near-optimal mechanisms for welfare maximization in multi-winner elections. In: AAAI (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Borodin, A., Lev, O., Shah, N., Strangway, T.: Primarily about primaries. In: AAAI (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Boutilier, C.: Optimal social choice functions: a utilitarian view. Artif. Intell. 227, 190–213 (2015)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  12. Campbell, D.E.: Social choice and intensity of preference. J. Polit. Econ. 81(1), 211–218 (1973)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Caragiannis, I., Nath, S., Procaccia, A.D., Shah, N.: Subset selection via implicit utilitarian voting. J. Artif. Intell. Res. 58, 123–152 (2017)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  14. Caragiannis, I., Procaccia, A.D.: Voting almost maximizes social welfare despite limited communication. Artif. Intell. 175(9–10), 1655–1671 (2011)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  15. Cheng, Y., Dughmi, S., Kempe, D.: Of the people: voting is more effective with representative candidates. In: EC (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Cheng, Y., Dughmi, S., Kempe, D.: On the distortion of voting with multiple representative candidates. In: AAAI (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Fain, B., Goel, A., Munagala, K., Prabhu, N.: Random dictators with a random referee: constant sample complexity mechanisms for social choice. In: AAAI (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Farquhar, P.H., Keller, L.R.: Preference intensity measurement. Ann. Oper. Res. 19(1), 205–217 (1989)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  19. Feldman, M., Fiat, A., Golomb, I.: On voting and facility location. In: EC (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Filos-Ratsikas, A., Micha, E., Voudouris, A.A.: The distortion of distributed voting. In: SAGT (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Gerasimou, G.: Preference intensity representation and revelation. School of Economics and Finance Discussion Paper No. 1716 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Ghodsi, M., Latifian, M., Seddighin, M.: On the distortion value of the elections with abstention. In: AAAI (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Goel, A., Hulett, R., Krishnaswamy, A.K.: Relating metric distortion and fairness of social choice rules. In: NetEcon (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Goel, A., Krishnaswamy, A.K., Munagala, K.: Metric distortion of social choice rules: lower bounds and fairness properties. In: EC (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Grofman, B., Merrill III, S.: A Unified Theory of Voting: Directional and Proximity Spatial Models. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Gross, S., Anshelevich, E., Xia, L.: Vote until two of you agree: mechanisms with small distortion and sample complexity. In: AAAI (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Hinich, M.J., Enelow, J.M.: The Spatial Theory of Voting: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1984)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  28. Lu, J., Zhang, D. K., Rabinovich, Z., Obraztsova, S., Vorobeychik, Y.: Manipulating elections by selecting issues. In: AAMAS (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Mandal, D., Procaccia, A.D., Shah, N., Woodruff, D.P.: Efficient and thrifty voting by any means necessary. In: NeurIPS 2019

    Google Scholar 

  30. Moulin, H.: Choosing from a tournament. Soc. Choice Welfare 3(4), 271–291 (1986)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  31. Munagala, K., Wang, K.: Improved metric distortion for deterministic social choice rules. In: EC (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Ordeshook, P.C., McKelvey, R.D.: A decade of experimental research on spatial models of elections and committees. In: Advances in the Spatial Theory of Voting, p. 99 (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Pierczyński, G., Skowron, P.: Approval-Based Elections and Distortion of Voting Rules. arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.06709 (2019)

  34. Procaccia, A.D., Rosenschein, J.S.: The distortion of cardinal preferences in voting. In: Klusch, M., Rovatsos, M., Payne, T.R. (eds.) CIA 2006. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4149, pp. 317–331. Springer, Heidelberg (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/11839354_23

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  35. Schofield, N.: The Spatial Model of Politics. Routledge, Abingdon (2007)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  36. Skowron, P.K., Elkind, E.: Social choice under metric preferences: scoring rules and STV. In: AAAI (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  37. Willmoore, K., Carey, G.W.: The “intensity” problem and democratic theory. Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 62(1), 5–24 (1968)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA

    Ben Abramowitz, Elliot Anshelevich & Wennan Zhu

Authors
  1. Ben Abramowitz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Elliot Anshelevich
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Wennan Zhu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Ben Abramowitz , Elliot Anshelevich or Wennan Zhu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Patras, Rio, Greece

    Ioannis Caragiannis

  2. Google Research New York, New York, NY, USA

    Vahab Mirrokni

  3. The University of Texas System, Austin, TX, USA

    Evdokia Nikolova

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Abramowitz, B., Anshelevich, E., Zhu, W. (2019). Awareness of Voter Passion Greatly Improves the Distortion of Metric Social Choice. In: Caragiannis, I., Mirrokni, V., Nikolova, E. (eds) Web and Internet Economics. WINE 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11920. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35389-6_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35389-6_1

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-35388-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-35389-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation