TY - JOUR
T1 - A multivariate complexity analysis of lobbying in multiple referenda
AU - Bredereck, Robert
AU - Chen, Jiehua
AU - Hartung, Sepp
AU - Kratsch, Stefan
AU - Niedermeier, Rolf
AU - Suchy, Ondřej
AU - Woeginger, Gerhard J.
PY - 2014/1/1
Y1 - 2014/1/1
N2 - Assume that each of n voters may or may not approve each of m issues. If an agent (the lobby) may influence up to k voters, then the central question of the NP-hard Lobbying problem is whether the lobby can choose the voters to be influenced so that as a result each issue gets a majority of approvals. This problem can be modeled as a simple matrix modification problem: Can one replace k rows of a binary n × m-matrix by k all-1 rows such that each column in the resulting matrix has a majority of 1s? Significantly extending on previous work that showed parameterized intractability (W[2]-completeness) with respect to the number k of modified rows, we study how natural parameters such as n, m, k, or the "maximum number of 1s missing for any column to have a majority of 1s" (referred to as "gap value g") govern the computational complexity of Lobbying. Among other results, we prove that Lobbying is fixed-parameter tractable for parameter m and provide a greedy logarithmic-factor approximation algorithm which solves Lobbying even optimally if m ≤ 4. We also show empirically that this greedy algorithm performs well on general instances. As a further key result, we prove that Lobbying is LOGSNP-complete for constant values g ≥ 1, thus providing a first natural complete problem from voting for this complexity class of limited nondeterminism.
AB - Assume that each of n voters may or may not approve each of m issues. If an agent (the lobby) may influence up to k voters, then the central question of the NP-hard Lobbying problem is whether the lobby can choose the voters to be influenced so that as a result each issue gets a majority of approvals. This problem can be modeled as a simple matrix modification problem: Can one replace k rows of a binary n × m-matrix by k all-1 rows such that each column in the resulting matrix has a majority of 1s? Significantly extending on previous work that showed parameterized intractability (W[2]-completeness) with respect to the number k of modified rows, we study how natural parameters such as n, m, k, or the "maximum number of 1s missing for any column to have a majority of 1s" (referred to as "gap value g") govern the computational complexity of Lobbying. Among other results, we prove that Lobbying is fixed-parameter tractable for parameter m and provide a greedy logarithmic-factor approximation algorithm which solves Lobbying even optimally if m ≤ 4. We also show empirically that this greedy algorithm performs well on general instances. As a further key result, we prove that Lobbying is LOGSNP-complete for constant values g ≥ 1, thus providing a first natural complete problem from voting for this complexity class of limited nondeterminism.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84905505939&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1613/jair.4285
DO - 10.1613/jair.4285
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84905505939
VL - 50
SP - 409
EP - 446
JO - Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
JF - Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
SN - 1076-9757
ER -