Welfare Maximization in Perpetual Voting (Student Abstract)

Abstract

We study the computational problems associated with maximizing various welfare objectives—namely utilitarian welfare, egalitarian welfare, and Nash welfare—in perpetual voting, a sequential collective decision-making framework. Prior work look into notions of fairness over time and study extensions of single-round voting rules to the multi-round setting. We show that while a utilitarian-welfare maximizing outcome can be computed efficiently, an outcome that maximizes egalitarian or Nash welfare is computationally intractable, even in the case of two candidates. We complement this by showing that maximizing egalitarian welfare is fixed-parameter tractable in the number of agents, and maximizing egalitarian or Nash welfare is W[2]-hard and slicewise polynomial in the number of timesteps. We also provide an approximation algorithm for maximizing egalitarian welfare and study strategyproofness with respect to these welfare objectives. Finally, we show that a simple greedy algorithm can achieve approximate proportionality in this setting.