Abstract
We present a systematic study of Plurality elections with strategic voters who, in addition to having preferences over election winners, also have secondary preferences, governing their behavior when their vote cannot affect the election outcome. Specifically, we study two models that have been recently considered in the literature: lazy voters, who prefer to abstain when they are not pivotal, and truth-biased voters, who prefer to vote truthfully when they are not pivotal. For both lazy and truth-biased voters, we are interested in their behavior under different tie-breaking rules (lexicographic rule, random voter rule, random candidate rule). Two of these six combinations of secondary preferences and tie-breaking rules have been studied in prior work; for the remaining four, we characterize pure Nash equilibria (PNE) of the resulting strategic games and study the complexity of related computational problems. We then use these results to analyze the impact of different secondary preferences and tie-breaking rules on the election outcomes. Our results extend to settings where some of the voters are non-strategic.
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Acknowledgements
The work of Elkind was partially supported by ERC-StG 639945. Markakis was supported by the European Union (European Social Fund - ESF) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program “Education and Lifelong Learning” of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) Research Funding Program: THALES, investing in knowledge society through the European Social Fund. Obraztsova’s work was partially supported by RFFI grant 14-01-00156-a.
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Elkind, E., Markakis, E., Obraztsova, S., Skowron, P. (2015). Equilibria of Plurality Voting: Lazy and Truth-Biased Voters. In: Hoefer, M. (eds) Algorithmic Game Theory. SAGT 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9347. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48433-3_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48433-3_9
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