Voting almost maximizes social welfare despite limited communication

Authors:
Ioannis Caragiannis;Ariel D. Procaccia
Affiliations:
Research Academic Computer Technology Institute & Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics, University of Patras, Greece;School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, USA
Venue:
Artificial Intelligence
Year:
2011

Citing 11
Cited 3

Randomized algorithms

Randomized algorithms
Voting for movies: the anatomy of a recommender system

Proceedings of the third annual conference on Autonomous Agents
Social Choice Theory and Recommender Systems: Analysis of the Axiomatic Foundations of Collaborative Filtering

Proceedings of the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Twelfth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Finding frequent items in data streams

Theoretical Computer Science - Special issue on automata, languages and programming
Communication complexity of common voting rules

Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
An improved data stream summary: the count-min sketch and its applications

Journal of Algorithms
Combining Information Extraction Systems Using Voting and Stacked Generalization

The Journal of Machine Learning Research
On the robustness of preference aggregation in noisy environments

Proceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
CP-nets: a tool for representing and reasoning with conditional ceteris paribus preference statements

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
Auctions with severely bounded communication

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
The distortion of cardinal preferences in voting

CIA'06 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Cooperative Information Agents

Voting with limited information and many alternatives

Proceedings of the twenty-third annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete Algorithms
Optimal social choice functions: a utilitarian view

Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
A smooth transition from powerlessness to absolute power

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In cooperative multiagent systems an alternative that maximizes the social welfare-the sum of utilities-can only be selected if each agent reports its full utility function. This may be infeasible in environments where communication is restricted. Employing a voting rule to choose an alternative greatly reduces the communication burden, but leads to a possible gap between the social welfare of the optimal alternative and the social welfare of the one that is ultimately elected. Procaccia and Rosenschein (2006) [13] have introduced the concept of distortion to quantify this gap. In this paper, we present the notion of embeddings into voting rules: functions that receive an agent@?s utility function and return the agent@?s vote. We establish that very low distortion can be obtained using randomized embeddings, especially when the number of agents is large compared to the number of alternatives. We investigate our ideas in the context of three prominent voting rules with low communication costs: Plurality, Approval, and Veto. Our results arguably provide a compelling reason for employing voting in cooperative multiagent systems.