Let’s Agree to Agree: Targeting Consensus for Incomplete Preferences through Majority Dynamics

Let’s Agree to Agree: Targeting Consensus for Incomplete Preferences through Majority Dynamics

Sirin Botan, Simon Rey, Zoi Terzopoulou

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 123-129. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/18

We study settings in which agents with incomplete preferences need to make a collective decision. We focus on a process of majority dynamics where issues are addressed one at a time and undecided agents follow the opinion of the majority. We assess the effects of this process on various consensus notions—such as the Condorcet winner—and show that in the worst case, myopic adherence to the majority damages existing consensus; yet, simulation experiments indicate that the damage is often mild. We also examine scenarios where the chair of the decision process can control the existence (or the identity) of consensus, by determining the order in which the issues are discussed.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Computational Social Choice