Abstract

Social choice is the study of the issues arising when a population of individuals attempts to combine its views with the objective of determining a collective policy. Recent research in artificial intelligence raises concerns of articial intelligence agents applying computational resources to attack an election. If we think of voting as a way to combine honest preferences, it would be undesirable for some voters cast ballots that differ from their true preferences and achieve a better result for themselves at the expense of the general social welfare. Such an attack is called manipulation. The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem holds that all reasonable voting rules will admit a situation in which some voter achieves a better result for itself by misrepresenting its preferences. Bartholdi and Orlin showed that finding a beneficial manipulation under the single transferable vote rule is NP-Complete. Our work explores the practical dificulty of the coalitional manipulation problem. We computed the minimum sizes of successful manipulating coalitions, and compared this to theoretical results.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Voting--Mathematical models; Social choice--Mathematical models; Elections--Corrupt practices; Elections--Management; Artificial intelligence--Social aspects

Publication Date

2010

Document Type

Thesis

Department, Program, or Center

Computer Science (GCCIS)

Advisor

Hemaspaandra, Edith

Comments

Note: imported from RIT’s Digital Media Library running on DSpace to RIT Scholar Works. Physical copy available through RIT's The Wallace Library at: JF1001 .C66 2010

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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