Even More Effort Towards Improved Bounds and Fixed-Parameter Tractability for Multiwinner Rules

Multiwinner elections have proven to be a fruitful research topic with many real-world applications. We contribute to this line of research by improving the state of the art regarding the computational complexity of computing good committees. More formally, given a set of candidates C , a set of voters V —each ranking the candidates according to their preferences, and an integer k; a multiwinner voting rule identifies a k-sized committee, based on these given voter preferences. In this paper we consider several utilitarian and egailitarian ordered weighted average scoring rules, which are an extensively-researched family of rules (and a subfamily of the family of committee scoring rules). First, we improve the result of Betzler et al. (JAIR 47:475–519, 2013), which gave a O(nⁿ) algorithm for computing winner under the Chamberlin–Courant rule, where n is the number of voters; to a running time of O(2 ⁿ) , which is optimal. Furthermore, we study the parameterized complexity of the Pessimist voting rule and describe a few tractable and intractable cases. Apart from such utilitarian voting rules, we extend our study and consider egalitarian median and egalitarian mean (both committee scoring rules), showing some tractable and intractable results, based on nontrivial structural observations.