Voting Rules for Expressing Conditional Preferences in Multiwinner Elections

Submitted by admin on Wed, 03/04/2019 - 09:59
Name
Giorgos Papasotiropoulos
Date of Defense
09-04-2019
Three-member Committee
Dimitris Fotakis
Nikos Leonardos
Evangelos Markakis (Co-Advisor)
Aris Pagourtzis (Co-Advisor)
Abstract

Computational Social Choice studies the aggregation of individual preferences toward a collective decision from an algorithmic point of view. Various problems in multiagent systems, decision making technologies, network design, policy making, recommendation systems and so on, require the design and theoretical evaluation of a wide range of voting rules.

In the first chapter we present the origins, possible applications, some of its subtopics as well as a historical overview of the field. In the second chapter we introduce the reader to election scenarios with more than a single winner by describing some commonly desired properties of multi-winner voting rules and defining the most widely used rules together with a glance at algorithmic and computational aspects. Since in many voting settings, voters wish to be allowed to express preferential dependencies, in the third chapter we focus on elections on combinatorial domains by presenting some specific applications along with some solutions which have been proposed in order to deal with combinatorial votes. Ultimately, in the fourth chapter we describe the recently proposed model for handling conditional approval preferences on multiple binary issues followed by some new contributions which concerns optimum and approximate results for minisum and minimax conditional approval voting rule.