TY - GEN
T1 - The distortion of cardinal preferences in voting
AU - Procaccia, Ariel D.
AU - Rosenschein, Jeffrey S.
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - The theoretical guarantees provided by voting have distinguished it as a prominent method of preference aggregation among autonomous agents. However, unlike humans, agents usually assign each candidate an exact utility, whereas an election is resolved based solely on each voter's linear ordering of candidates. In essence, the agents' cardinal (utility-based) preferences are embedded into the space of ordinal preferences. This often gives rise to a distortion in the preferences, and hence in the social welfare of the outcome. In this paper, we formally define and analyze the concept of distortion. We fully characterize the distortion under different restrictions imposed on agents' cardinal preferences; both possibility and strong impossibility results are established. We also tackle some computational aspects of calculating the distortion. Ultimately, we argue that, whenever voting is applied in a multiagent system, distortion must be a pivotal consideration.
AB - The theoretical guarantees provided by voting have distinguished it as a prominent method of preference aggregation among autonomous agents. However, unlike humans, agents usually assign each candidate an exact utility, whereas an election is resolved based solely on each voter's linear ordering of candidates. In essence, the agents' cardinal (utility-based) preferences are embedded into the space of ordinal preferences. This often gives rise to a distortion in the preferences, and hence in the social welfare of the outcome. In this paper, we formally define and analyze the concept of distortion. We fully characterize the distortion under different restrictions imposed on agents' cardinal preferences; both possibility and strong impossibility results are established. We also tackle some computational aspects of calculating the distortion. Ultimately, we argue that, whenever voting is applied in a multiagent system, distortion must be a pivotal consideration.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=33751001041&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/11839354_23
DO - 10.1007/11839354_23
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AN - SCOPUS:33751001041
SN - 354038569X
SN - 9783540385691
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 317
EP - 331
BT - Cooperative Information Agents X - 10th International Workshop, CIA 2006. Proceedings
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 10th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents, CIA 2006
Y2 - 11 September 2006 through 13 September 2006
ER -