31 July 2008, Computational Social Choice Seminar, Nadya Peek

Abstract

There are many different ways to elect a winner from a group of candidates. The best known method is the plurality rule, for which each voter selects one candidate to vote for and the candidate receiving the most votes wins. Some rules require the voters to rank the candidates, and assign points depending on their position, again with the candidate with the most points winning. An example of a positional scoring rule like this is the Borda count. There are many other voting procedures in use as well, such as approval voting or the single transferable vote. In this talk we will present two different comparisons of a selection of voting procedures: firstly we found the smallest election instances in which the different procedures would elect different candidates, secondly we generated many election instances with random sets of voters and checked how often the rules would differ on average.

This work has been carried out in the context of the BSc Artificial Intelligence Honours Programme at the Universiteit van Amsterdam.

For more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/~ulle/seminar/ or contact Ulle Endriss (ulle.endriss at uva.nl).