An Experimental Comparison of Multiwinner Voting Rules on Approval Elections

An Experimental Comparison of Multiwinner Voting Rules on Approval Elections

Piotr Faliszewski, Martin Lackner, Krzysztof Sornat, Stanisław Szufa

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2675-2683. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/298

In this paper, we experimentally compare major approval based multiwinner voting rules. To this end, we define a measure of similarity between two equal sized committees subject to a given election. Using synthetic elections coming from several distributions, we analyze how similar are the committees provided by prominent voting rules. Our results can be visualized as maps of voting rules, which provide a counterpoint to a purely axiomatic classification of voting rules. The strength of our proposed method is its independence from preimposed classifications (such as the satisfaction of concrete axioms), and that it indeed offers a much finer distinction than the current state of axiomatic analysis.
Keywords:
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Computational social choice