A Quantitative Analysis of Multi-Winner Rules

A Quantitative Analysis of Multi-Winner Rules

Martin Lackner, Piotr Skowron

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 407-413. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/58

To choose a suitable multi-winner voting rule is a hard and ambiguous task. Depending on the context, it varies widely what constitutes the choice of an "optimal" subset.In this paper, we offer a new perspective on measuring the quality of such subsets and---consequently---of multi-winner rules. We provide a quantitative analysis using methods from the theory of approximation algorithms and estimate how well multi-winner rules approximate two extreme objectives: diversity as captured by the Approval Chamberlin--Courant rule and individual excellence as captured by Multi-winner Approval Voting. With both theoretical and experimental methods we classify multi-winner rules in terms of their quantitative alignment with these two opposing objectives.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Computational Social Choice
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Voting