More complicated questions about maxima and minima, and some closures of NP
Theoretical Computer Science
Raising NP lower bounds to parallel NP lower bounds
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Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness
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Two remarks on the power of counting
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SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics
A Short Introduction to Computational Social Choice
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Computing slater rankings using similarities among candidates
AAAI'06 Proceedings of the 21st national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1
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Given a binary dominance relation on a set of alternatives, a common thread in the social sciences is to identify subsets of alternatives that satisfy certain notions of stability. Examples can be found in areas as diverse as voting theory, game theory, and argumentation theory. Brandt and Fischer [1] proved that it is NP-hard to decide whether an alternative is contained in some inclusion-minimal unidirectional (i.e., either upward or downward) covering set. For both problems, we raise this lower bound to the $\Theta_2^p$ level of the polynomial hierarchy and provide a $\Sigma_2^p$ upper bound. Relatedly, we show that a variety of other natural problems regarding minimal or minimum-size unidirectional covering sets are hard or complete for either of NP, coNP, and $\Theta_2^p$. An important consequence of our results is that neither minimal upward nor minimal downward covering sets (even when guaranteed to exist) can be computed in polynomial time unless P=NP. This sharply contrasts with Brandt and Fischer's result that minimal bidirectional covering sets are polynomial-time computable.