Plurality Voting Under Uncertainty

Authors

  • Reshef Meir Harvard University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v29i1.9435

Keywords:

voting, convergence, equilibrium, regret minimization

Abstract

Understanding the nature of strategic voting is the holy grail of social choice theory, where game-theory, social science and recently computational approaches are all applied in order to model the incentives and behavior of voters. In a recent paper, Meir et al.[EC'14] made another step in this direction, by suggesting a behavioral game-theoretic model for voters under uncertainty. For a specific variation of best-response heuristics, they proved initial existence and convergence results in the Plurality voting system. This paper extends the model in multiple directions, considering voters with different uncertainty levels, simultaneous strategic decisions, and a more permissive notion of best-response. It is proved that a voting equilibrium exists even in the most general case. Further, any society voting in an iterative setting is guaranteed to converge to an equilibrium. An alternative behavior is analyzed, where voters try to minimize their worst-case regret. As it turns out, the two behaviors coincide in the simple setting of Meir et al.[EC'14], but not in the general case.

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Published

2015-02-18

How to Cite

Meir, R. (2015). Plurality Voting Under Uncertainty. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 29(1). https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v29i1.9435

Issue

Section

AAAI Technical Track: Multiagent Systems