Large-scale election campaigns: Combinatorial shift bribery

Robert Bredereck, Piotr Faliszewski, Rolf Niedermeier, Nimrod Talmon

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

We study the complexity of a combinatorial variant of the Shift Bribery problem in elections. In the standard Shift Bribery problem, we are given an election where each voter has a preference order over the candidate set and where an outside agent, the briber, can pay each voter to rank the briber's favorite candidate a given number of positions higher. The goal is to ensure the victory of the briber's preferred candidate. The combinatorial variant of the problem, introduced in this paper, models settings where it is possible to affect the position of the preferred candidate in multiple votes, either positively or negatively, with a single bribery action. This variant of the problem is particularly interesting in the context of large-scale campaign management problems (which, from the technical side, are modeled as bribery problems). We show that, in general, the combinatorial variant of the problem is highly intractable (NP-hard, hard in the parameterized sense, and hard to approximate), but we provide some (approximation) algorithms for natural restricted cases.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAAMAS 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
EditorsEdith Elkind, Rafael H. Bordini, Gerhard Weiss, Pinar Yolum
PublisherInternational Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS)
Pages67-75
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781450337694
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2015
Externally publishedYes
Event14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2015 - Istanbul, Turkey
Duration: 4 May 20158 May 2015

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS
Volume1
ISSN (Print)1548-8403
ISSN (Electronic)1558-2914

Conference

Conference14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2015
Country/TerritoryTurkey
CityIstanbul
Period4/05/158/05/15

Keywords

  • Approximation algorithms
  • Campaign management
  • Computational complexity
  • Fixed-parameter tractability
  • Parameterized complexity
  • Preference aggregation
  • Voting

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Software
  • Control and Systems Engineering

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