Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: We discuss voting scenarios in which the set of voters (agents) and the set of alternatives are the same; that is, voters select a single representative from among themselves. Such a scenario happens, for instance, when a committee selects a chairperson, or when peer researchers select a prize winner. Our model assumes that each voter either renders worthy (confirms) or unworthy any other agent. We further assume that the prime goal of any agent is to be selected himself. Only if that is not feasible, will he try to get one of those he confirms selected. In this paper we investigate the open-sequential ballot system in the above model. We consider both plurality (where each voter has one vote) and approval (where a voter may vote for any subset). Our results show that it is possible to find scenarios in which the selected agent is much less popular than the optimal (most popular) agent. We prove, however, that in the case of approval voting, the ratio between their popularity is always bounded from above by 2. In the case of plurality voting, we show that there are cases in which some of the equilibria give an unbounded ratio, but there always exists at least one equilibrium with ratio 2 at most.
DOI: 10.4204/eptcs.297.2
Authors: Yakov Babichenko, Oren Dean, Moshe Tennenholtz
Institution: Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Funder: European Commission
Awards: G204204078, G434337789
OpenAlex ID: W2872267627