Speaker: Reyhaneh Reyhani
Affiliation: Computer Science Department, The University of Auckland
Title: New measures of the difficulty of manipulation of voting rules
Date: Monday, 27 Apr 2009, 3:00 pm
Location: Room 401

Voting systems as a method for aggregating different opinions of group members are used extensively in different fields. Except for dictatorships, all voting systems are susceptible to strategic manipulation. From the perspective of mechanism design, it is generally regarded desirable to minimize the occurrence of strategic manipulation of voting rules.

One method for designing a safer voting system against strategic manipulation is to find rules that minimize the number of situations in which manipulation can succeed.

In this talk, we introduce new measures of manipulability of anonymous voting rules and argue for their superiority over some commonly used measures. We give a simple common framework that describes these measures and connects them to recent literature. We discuss their computation and present numerical results that allow for comparison of various common voting rules. This is joint work with Geoffrey Pritchard and Mark Wilson.

Finally, I will mention some issues that I intend to consider in future for my PhD thesis.