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Is Computational Complexity a Barrier to Manipulation?

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Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems (CLIMA 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6245))

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Abstract

When agents are acting together, they may need a simple mechanism to decide on joint actions. One possibility is to have the agents express their preferences in the form of a ballot and use a voting rule to decide the winning action(s). Unfortunately, agents may try to manipulate such an election by mis-reporting their preferences. Fortunately, it has been shown that it is NP-hard to compute how to manipulate a number of different voting rules. However, NP-hardness only bounds the worst-case complexity. Recent theoretical results suggest that manipulation may often be easy in practice. To address this issue, I suggest studying empirically if computational complexity is in practice a barrier to manipulation. The basic tool used in my investigations is the identification of computational “phase transitions”. Such an approach has been fruitful in identifying hard instances of propositional satisfiability and other NP-hard problems. I show that phase transition behaviour gives insight into the hardness of manipulating voting rules, increasing concern that computational complexity is indeed any sort of barrier. Finally, I look at the problem of computing manipulation of other, related problems like stable marriage and tournament problems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NICTA and University of NSW, Sydney, Australia

    Toby Walsh

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  1. Toby Walsh
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Clausthal University of Technology, Julius-Albert-Str. 4, 38678, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

    Jürgen Dix

  2. Departamento de Informática, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências de Tecnologia, 2829-516, Caparica, Portugal

    João Leite

  3. NICTA,, P.O. Box 6030, 4067, St Lucia, QLD, Australia

    Guido Governatori

  4. University of Luxembourg, Campus Kirchberg, 6, rue, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, 1359, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Wojtek Jamroga

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Walsh, T. (2010). Is Computational Complexity a Barrier to Manipulation?. In: Dix, J., Leite, J., Governatori, G., Jamroga, W. (eds) Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems. CLIMA 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6245. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14977-1_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14977-1_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-14976-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-14977-1

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