Abstract:
In the standard model of voting, it is assumed that a voting rule observes the ranked preferences of each individual over a set of alternatives and makes a collective decision. In practice, however, not every individual votes. Is it possible to make a good collective decision for a group given the preferences of only a few of its members? We propose a framework in which we are given the ranked preferences of k out of n individuals sampled from a distribution, and the goal is to predict what a given voting rule would output if applied on the underlying preferences of all n individuals. We focus on the family of positional scoring rules, derive a strong negative result when the underlying preferences can be arbitrary, and discover interesting phenomena when they are generated from a known distribution.

Published Date: 2020-06-02
Registration: ISSN 2374-3468 (Online) ISSN 2159-5399 (Print) ISBN 978-1-57735-835-0 (10 issue set)
Copyright: Published by AAAI Press, Palo Alto, California USA Copyright © 2020, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence All Rights Reserved
DOI:
10.1609/aaai.v34i02.5593