TY - GEN
T1 - Junta distributions and the average-case complexity of manipulating elections
AU - Procaccia, Ariel D.
AU - Rosenschein, Jeffrey S.
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - Encouraging voters to truthfully reveal their preferences in an election has long been an important issue. Previous studies have shown that some voting protocols are hard to manipulate, but predictably used NP-hardness as the complexity measure. Such a worst-case analysis may be an insufficient guarantee of resistance to manipulation. Indeed, we demonstrate that NP-hard manipulations may be tractable in the average-case. For this purpose, we augment the existing theory of average-case complexity with new concepts; we consider elections distributed with respect to junta distributions, which concentrate on hard instances, and introduce a notion of heuristic polynomial time. We use our techniques to prove that a family of important voting protocols is susceptible to manipulation by coalitions, when the number of candidates is constant.
AB - Encouraging voters to truthfully reveal their preferences in an election has long been an important issue. Previous studies have shown that some voting protocols are hard to manipulate, but predictably used NP-hardness as the complexity measure. Such a worst-case analysis may be an insufficient guarantee of resistance to manipulation. Indeed, we demonstrate that NP-hard manipulations may be tractable in the average-case. For this purpose, we augment the existing theory of average-case complexity with new concepts; we consider elections distributed with respect to junta distributions, which concentrate on hard instances, and introduce a notion of heuristic polynomial time. We use our techniques to prove that a family of important voting protocols is susceptible to manipulation by coalitions, when the number of candidates is constant.
KW - Computational complexity
KW - Voting
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=34247257901&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/1160633.1160726
DO - 10.1145/1160633.1160726
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AN - SCOPUS:34247257901
SN - 1595933034
SN - 9781595933034
T3 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents
SP - 497
EP - 504
BT - Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
T2 - Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS
Y2 - 8 May 2006 through 12 May 2006
ER -