Abstract

Preferences can be aggregated using a voting rule. Each agent gives their preference orderings over a set of candidates, and a voting rule is used to compute the winner. We consider voting rules which perform a sequence of pairwise comparisons between two candidates, where the result of each is computed by a majority vote. The winner thus depends on the chosen sequence of comparisons, which can be represented by a binary tree. There are candidates that will win in some trees (called possible winners) or in all trees (called Condorcet winners). While it is easy to find the possible and Condorcet winners, we prove that it is difficult if we insist that the tree is balanced. This restriction is therefore enough to make voting difficult for the chair to manipulate. We also consider the situation where we lack complete informations about preferences, and determine the computational complexity of computing possible and Condorcet winners in this extended case. 1

Citations