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Multiwinner Analogues of the Plurality Rule: Axiomatic and Algorithmic Perspectives

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Multiwinner Analogues of the Plurality Rule: Axiomatic and Algorithmic Perspectives Proceedings of the Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16) Multiwinner Analogues of the Plurality Rule: Axiomatic and Algorithmic Perspectives Piotr Faliszewski Piotr Skowron Arkadii Slinko Nimrod Talmon AGH University University of Oxford University of Auckland TU Berlin Krakow, Poland Oxford, United Kingdom Auckland, New Zealand Berlin, Germany [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract most desired one to the least desired one, and the goal is to pick a committee of a given size k that, in some sense, best We characterize the class of committee scoring rules that sat- matches the voters’ preferences. Naturally, the exact mean- isfy the fixed-majority criterion. In some sense, the commit- ing of the phrase “best matches” depends strongly on the ap- tee scoring rules in this class are multiwinner analogues of the single-winner Plurality rule, which is uniquely character- plication at hand, as well as on the societal conventions and ized as the only single-winner scoring rule that satisfies the understanding of fairness. For example, if we are to choose simple majority criterion. We find that, for most of the rules a size-k parliament, then it is important to guarantee pro- in our new class, the complexity of winner determination is portional representation; if the goal is to pick a group of high (i.e., the problem of computing the winners is NP-hard), products to offer to customers, then it might be important to but we also show some examples of polynomial-time winner maintain diversity of the offer; if we are to shortlist a group determination procedures, exact and approximate. of candidates for a job, then it is important to focus on the quality of the selected candidates regardless of how similar Introduction some of them might be. In effect, there is quite a variety of multiwinner voting The scoring rules in general, and the Plurality rule specifi- rules. For example, under the SNTV rule, the winning com- cally, are among the most basic and the best studied single- mittee consists of k candidates who are ranked first more winner voting rules. However, our understanding of their frequently than others. Under the Bloc rule, each voter gives recently-introduced multiwinner analogues, committee scor- one point to each candidate he or she ranks among his or ing rules (Elkind et al. 2014), is very limited. In this paper, her top k positions, and the committee consists of k candi- we attempt to rectify this situation by asking a seemingly dates with the most points. Under the Chamberlin–Courant very innocuous question: what is the committee scoring rule rule, the winning committee consists of k candidates such analogue of the Plurality rule? Using an axiomatic approach, that each voter ranks his or her most preferred committee we find a rather surprising answer. Not only is there a whole member as high as possible (for the exact definition see the class of committee scoring rules that correspond to the Plu- original paper of Chamberlin and Courant (1983) or pa- rality rule, but also one of the most natural candidates to be pers studying the rule’s features and computational com- the multiwinner Plurality, the single non-transferable vote plexity (Procaccia, Rosenschein, and Zohar 2008; Lu and rule (the SNTV rule), falls short on our criterion. On the Boutilier 2011; Elkind et al. 2014; Skowron, Faliszewski, other hand, the Bloc rule turns out to be quite a satisfy- and Slinko 2015; Skowron and Faliszewski 2015)). ing candidate, but certainly not the only one. In addition to The three rules mentioned above are examples of commit- our axiomatic study, we provide an algorithmic analysis of tee scoring rules (a class of rules generalizing single-winner this new class of committee scoring rules. In particular, we scoring rules to the multiwinner setting, recently introduced show that it can be seen as a subfamily of the OWA-based by Elkind et al. (2014); see the preliminaries for the defini- rules of Skowron, Faliszewski, and Lang (2015) (also stud- tion).1 Of course, there are natural multiwinner rules that ied by Aziz et al. (2015b; 2015a); see also the work of Kil- cannot be expressed as committee scoring rules, such as gour (2010) for a more general overview of approval-based the single transferable vote rule (the STV rule), the Mon- multiwinner rules). However, the hardness results for gen- roe rule (Monroe 1995), or all the multiwinner rules based eral OWA rules do not translate directly to our case (and on the Condorcet principle (see, e.g., the works of Elkind et some indeed do not even hold). On the side, we provide an al. (2011), Fishburn (1981), and Gehrlein (1985)). Nonethe- axiomatic characterization of the Bloc rule (among the com- less, we believe that committee scoring rules form a very mittee scoring rules). diverse class of voting rules that deserves a further study. Let us now describe our setting more precisely. In a mul- We ask for a committee scoring rule that can be seen as tiwinner election, each voter ranks the candidates from the Copyright c 2016, Association for the Advancement of Artificial 1Naturally, these rules were known much earlier than Elkind et Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. al. (2014) introduced the unifying framework for them. 482 a “multiwinner analogue” of the Plurality rule. Intuitively, it of voters. The number m = |C| will be fixed throughout the might seem as if the SNTV rule were such a rule and the paper. Each voter vi is associated with a preference order i question were trivial. However, instead of following this in- in which vi ranks the candidates from its most desirable one tuition we take an axiomatic approach. We note that Plural- to its least desirable one. If X and Y are two (disjoint) sub- ity is the only single-winner scoring rule that has the simple sets of C, then by X i Y we mean that for each x ∈ X majority property, i.e., that guarantees that if a candidate is and each y ∈ Y it holds that x i y. For a positive integer t, ranked first by a simple majority of the voters, then he or she we denote the set {1,...,t} by [t]. is the unique winner of the election. We ask for a committee scoring rule that has the fixed-majority criterion (a multi- Single-Winner Voting Rules. A single-winner voting winner analogue of the simple majority property, introduced rule R is a function that, given an election E =(C, V ), by Debord (1993)), which requires that if there is a majority outputs a subset of those candidates that tie as winners. of voters each of whom ranks the same k candidates in the There is quite a variety of single-winner voting rules, but top k positions (perhaps in a different order), then these k in this paper it suffices to consider the scoring rules. Given candidates should form a unique winning committee. a voter v and a candidate c, we write posv(c) to denote the The Bloc rule obviously satisfies the fixed-majority crite- position of c in v’s preference order (e.g., if v ranks c first rion. However, it turns out that Bloc is by far not the only then posv(c)=1). A scoring function for m candidates is such committee scoring rule and there is a whole family of a function γ :[m] → N such that for each i ∈ [m − 1] we them. We provide an (almost) full characterization of this have γ(i) ≥ γ(i +1). Each scoring function γ defines a family2 and analyze the computational complexity of win- voting rule Rγ as follows. Let E =(C, V ) be an election 3 ner determination for rules in this family. Initially, we iden- with m candidates.Under Rγ , each candidate c ∈ C re- tify a slightly larger class of top-k-counting rules for which ceives score(c):= v∈V γ(posv(c)) points and the candi- the score that a committee receives from a given voter is a date with the highest number of points wins. (If there are function of the number of committee members that this voter several such candidates, then they all tie as winners; this ranks in the top k positions of its vote; we refer to this func- view is known as the nonunique-winner model.) We often tion as the counting function. We obtain the following main refer to the value score(c) as the γ-score of c. results: The following scoring functions are particularly interest- t αt(i)=1 1. For a large class of counting functions, top-k-counting ing. The -approval scoring function is defined as i ≤ t αt(i)=0 rules are NP-hard to compute. There are, however, some for and otherwise. For example, the Plurality rule is Rα , the t-Approval rule is Rα , and the polynomial-time computable ones (e.g., the Bloc rule and 1 t Veto rule is Rα (where m is the number of candidates). the Perfectionist rule that we introduce). m−1 The Borda scoring function for m candidates is defined as 2. If the counting function is convex, then the top-k-counting βm(i):=m − i, and Rβ is the Borda rule. rule that it defines satisfies the fixed-majority criterion (for a fairly intuitive relaxation of the convexity notion Multiwinner Voting Rules. A multiwinner voting rule R we get an “if and only if” result). is a function that, given an election E =(C, V ) and a num- k 3.
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