Markus Brill

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46ranked-venue papers
21as first author
19since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-9509-7017ORCID · verified

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Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 38 · 19 first-author · 19 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 32 · 17 first-author · 16 since 2021Theory of computation · 7 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 3Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 2 · 2 first-author
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Utilitarian Guarantees for the Method of Equal Shares
abstract
In recent years, research in Participatory Budgeting (PB) has put a greater emphasis on rules satisfying notions of fairness and proportionality, with the Method of Equal Shares (MES) being a prominent example. However, proportionality can come at a cost to the total utilitarian welfare. Our work formalizes this relationship, by deriving minimum utilitarian welfare guarantees for MES for a subclass of satisfaction functions called DNS functions, which includes two of the most popular ways of measuring a voter’s utility in the PB setting: considering (1) the total cost of approved projects or (2) the total number of those projects. Our results are parameterized in terms of minimum and maximum project costs, which allows us to improve on the mostly negative results found in prior studies, and reduce to the existing multiwinner guarantee when project costs are equal. We show that our guarantees are asymptotically tight for rules satisfying Extended Justified Representation up to one project, showing that no proportional rule can achieve a better utilitarian guarantee than MES.
Anton Baychkov, Markus Brill, Jannik Peters 0001
AAAI2
2026 The River Voting Method
abstract
We introduce River, a novel Condorcet-consistent voting method that is based on pairwise majority margins and can be seen as a simplified variation of Tideman's Ranked Pairs method. River is simple to explain, simple to compute even "by hand," and gives rise to an easy-to-interpret certificate in the form of a directed tree. Like Ranked Pairs and Schulze's Beat Path method, River is a refinement of the Split Cycle method and shares with those many desirable properties, including independence of clones. Unlike the other three methods, River satisfies a strong form of resistance to agenda-manipulation that is known as independence of Pareto-dominated alternatives.
Michelle Döring, Markus Brill, Jobst Heitzig
AAAI2
2025 Proportional Representation in Practice: Quantifying Proportionality in Ordinal Elections
abstract
Proportional representation plays a crucial role in electoral systems. In ordinal elections, where voters rank candidates based on their preferences, the Single Transferable Vote (STV) is the most widely used proportional voting method. STV is considered proportional because it satisfies an axiom requiring that large enough "solid coalitions" of voters are adequately represented. Using real-world data from local Scottish elections, we observe that solid coalitions of the required size rarely occur in practice. This observation challenges the importance of proportionality axioms and raises the question of how the proportionality of voting methods can be assessed beyond their axiomatic performance. We address these concerns by developing quantitative measures of proportionality. We apply these measures to evaluate the proportionality of voting rules on real-world election data. Besides STV, we consider SNTV, the Expanding Approvals Rule, and Sequential Ranked-Choice Voting. We also study the effects of ballot truncation by artificially completing truncated ballots and comparing the proportionality of outcomes under complete and truncated ballots.
Tuva Bardal, Markus Brill, David McCune, Jannik Peters 0001
AAAI2
2025 Approval-based committee voting under incomplete information
abstract
We investigate approval-based committee voting with incomplete information about the approval preferences of voters. We consider several models of incompleteness where each voter partitions the set of candidates into approved , disapproved , and unknown candidates, possibly with ordinal preference constraints among candidates in the latter category. This captures scenarios where voters have not evaluated all candidates and/or it is unknown where voters draw the threshold between approved and disapproved candidates. We study the complexity of some fundamental computational problems for a number of classic approval-based committee voting rules including Proportional Approval Voting and Chamberlin–Courant. These problems include determining whether a given set of candidates is a possible or necessary winning committee and whether a given candidate is possibly or necessarily a member of the winning committee. We also consider proportional representation axioms and the problem of deciding whether a given committee is possibly or necessarily representative.
Aviram Imber, Jonas Israel, Markus Brill, Benny Kimelfeld
Artif. Intell.3
2024 Approval-Based Committee Voting in Practice: A Case Study of (over-)Representation in the Polkadot Blockchain
abstract
We provide the first large-scale data collection of real-world approval-based committee elections. These elections have been conducted on the Polkadot blockchain as part of their Nominated Proof-of-Stake mechanism and contain around one thousand candidates and tens of thousands of (weighted) voters each. We conduct an in-depth study of application-relevant questions, including a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the outcomes returned by different voting rules. Besides considering proportionality measures that are standard in the multiwinner voting literature, we pay particular attention to less-studied measures of overrepresentation, as these are closely related to the security of the Polkadot network. We also analyze how different design decisions such as the committee size affect the examined measures.
Niclas Boehmer, Markus Brill, Alfonso Cevallos, Jonas Gehrlein, Luis Sánchez-Fernández 0001, Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin
AAAI2
2024 Completing Priceable Committees: Utilitarian and Representation Guarantees for Proportional Multiwinner Voting
abstract
When selecting committees based on preferences of voters, a variety of different criteria can be considered. Two natural objectives are maximizing the utilitarian welfare (the sum of voters' utilities) and coverage (the number of represented voters) of the selected committee. Previous work has studied the impact on utilitarian welfare and coverage when requiring the committee to satisfy minimal requirements such as justified representation or weak proportionality. In this paper, we consider the impact of imposing much more demanding proportionality axioms. We identify a class of voting rules that achieve strong guarantees on utilitarian welfare and coverage when combined with appropriate completions. This class is defined via a weakening of priceability and contains prominent rules such as the Method of Equal Shares. We show that committees selected by these rules (i) can be completed to achieve optimal coverage and (ii) can be completed to achieve an asymptotically optimal approximation to the utilitarian welfare if they additionally satisfy EJR+. Answering an open question of Elkind et al. (2022), we use the Greedy Justified Candidate Rule to obtain the best possible utilitarian guarantee subject to proportionality. We also consider completion methods suggested in the participatory budgeting literature and other objectives besides welfare and coverage.
Markus Brill, Jannik Peters 0001
AAAI1
2024 Spatial Voting with Incomplete Voter Information
abstract
We consider spatial voting where candidates are located in the Euclidean d-dimensional space, and each voter ranks candidates based on their distance from the voter's ideal point. We explore the case where information about the location of voters' ideal points is incomplete: for each dimension, we are given an interval of possible values. We study the computational complexity of finding the possible and necessary winners for positional scoring rules. Our results show that we retain tractable cases of the classic model where voters have partial-order preferences. Moreover, we show that there are positional scoring rules under which the possible-winner problem is intractable for partial orders, but tractable in the one-dimensional spatial setting. We also consider approval voting in this setting. We show that for up to two dimensions, the necessary-winner problem is tractable, while the possible-winner problem is hard for any number of dimensions.
Aviram Imber, Jonas Israel, Markus Brill, Hadas Shachnai, Benny Kimelfeld
AAAI3
2023 Multiwinner Voting with Possibly Unavailable Candidates
abstract
Selecting a committee that meets diversity and proportionality criteria is a challenging endeavor that has been studied extensively in recent years. This task becomes even more challenging when some of the selected candidates decline the invitation to join the committee. Since the unavailability of one candidate may impact the rest of the selection, inviting all candidates at the same time may lead to a suboptimal committee. Instead, invitations should be sequential and conditional on which candidates invited so far accepted the invitation: the solution to the committee selection problem is a query policy. If invitation queries are binding, they should be safe: one should not query a candidate without being sure that whatever the set of available candidates possible at that stage, her inclusion will not jeopardize committee optimality. Assuming approval-based inputs, we characterize the set of rules for which a safe query exists at every stage. In order to parallelize the invitation process, we investigate the computation of safe parallel queries, and show that it is often hard. We also study the existence of safe parallel queries with respect to proportionality axioms such as extended justified representation.
Markus Brill, Hayrullah Dindar, Jonas Israel, Jérôme Lang, Jannik Peters 0001, Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin
AAAI1
2023 Proportionality in Approval-Based Participatory Budgeting
abstract
The ability to measure the satisfaction of (groups of) voters is a crucial prerequisite for formulating proportionality axioms in approval-based participatory budgeting elections. Two common -- but very different -- ways to measure the satisfaction of a voter consider (i) the number of approved projects and (ii) the total cost of approved projects, respectively. In general, it is difficult to decide which measure of satisfaction best reflects the voters' true utilities. In this paper, we study proportionality axioms with respect to large classes of approval-based satisfaction functions. We establish logical implications among our axioms and related notions from the literature, and we ask whether outcomes can be achieved that are proportional with respect to more than one satisfaction function. We show that this is impossible for the two commonly used satisfaction functions when considering proportionality notions based on extended justified representation, but achievable for a notion based on proportional justified representation. For the latter result, we introduce a strengthening of priceability and show that it is satisfied by several polynomial-time computable rules, including the Method of Equal Shares and Phragmén's sequential rule.
Markus Brill, Stefan Forster, Martin Lackner, Jan Maly 0001, Jannik Peters 0001
AAAI1
2023 Proportionality Guarantees in Elections with Interdependent Issues
abstract
We consider a multi-issue election setting over a set of possibly interdependent issues with the goal of achieving proportional representation of the views of the electorate. To this end, we employ a proportionality criterion suggested recently in the literature, that guarantees fair representation for all groups of voters of sufficient size. For this criterion, there exist rules that perform well in the case where all the issues have a binary domain and are independent of each other. In particular, this has been shown for Proportional Approval Voting (PAV) and for the Method of Equal Shares (MES). In this paper, we go two steps further: we generalize these guarantees for issues with a non-binary domain, and, most importantly, we consider extensions to elections with dependencies among issues, where we identify restrictions that lead to analogous results. To achieve this, we define appropriate generalizations of PAV and MES to handle conditional ballots. In addition to proportionality considerations, we also examine the computational properties of the conditional version of MES. Our findings indicate that the conditional case poses additional challenges and differs significantly from the unconditional one, both in terms of proportionality guarantees and computational complexity.
Markus Brill, Evangelos Markakis 0001, Georgios Papasotiropoulos, Jannik Peters 0001
IJCAI1
2023 Robust and Verifiable Proportionality Axioms for Multiwinner Voting
abstract
When selecting a subset of candidates (a so-called committee) based on the preferences of voters, proportional representation is often a major desideratum. When going beyond simplistic models such as party-list or district-based elections, it is surprisingly challenging to capture proportionality formally. As a consequence, the literature has produced numerous competing criteria of when a selected committee qualifies as proportional. Two of the most prominent notions are proportionality for solid coalitions (PSC) [Dummett, 1984] and extended justified representation (EJR) [Aziz et al., 2017]. Both definitions guarantee proportional representation to groups of voters with very similar preferences; such groups are referred to as solid coalitions by Dummett and as cohesive groups by Aziz et al. However, they lose their bite when groups are only almost solid or cohesive.
Markus Brill, Jannik Peters 0001
EC1
2022 Liquid Democracy with Ranked Delegations
abstract
Liquid democracy is a novel paradigm for collective decision-making that gives agents the choice between casting a direct vote or delegating their vote to another agent. We consider a generalization of the standard liquid democracy setting by allowing agents to specify multiple potential delegates, together with a preference ranking among them. This generalization increases the number of possible delegation paths and enables higher participation rates because fewer votes are lost due to delegation cycles or abstaining agents. In order to implement this generalization of liquid democracy, we need to find a principled way of choosing between multiple delegation paths. In this paper, we provide a thorough axiomatic analysis of the space of delegation rules, i.e., functions assigning a feasible delegation path to each delegating agent. In particular, we prove axiomatic characterizations as well as an impossibility result for delegation rules. We also analyze requirements on delegation rules that have been suggested by practitioners, and introduce novel rules with attractive properties. By performing an extensive experimental analysis on synthetic as well as real-world data, we compare delegation rules with respect to several quantitative criteria relating to the chosen paths and the resulting distribution of voting power. Our experiments reveal that delegation rules can be aligned on a spectrum reflecting an inherent trade-off between competing objectives.
Markus Brill, Theo Delemazure, Anne-Marie George, Martin Lackner, Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin
AAAI1
2022 Individual Representation in Approval-Based Committee Voting
abstract
When selecting multiple candidates based on approval preferences of agents, the proportional representation of agents' opinions is an important and well-studied desideratum. Existing criteria for evaluating the representativeness of outcomes focus on groups of agents and demand that sufficiently large and cohesive groups are "represented" in the sense that candidates approved by some group members are selected. Crucially, these criteria say nothing about the representation of individual agents, even if these agents are members of groups that deserve representation. In this paper, we formalize the concept of individual representation (IR) and explore to which extent, and under which circumstances, it can be achieved. We show that checking whether an IR outcome exists is computationally intractable, and we verify that all common approval-based voting rules may fail to provide IR even in cases where this is possible. We then focus on domain restrictions and establish an interesting contrast between "voter interval" and "candidate interval" preferences. This contrast can also be observed in our experimental results, where we analyze the attainability of IR for realistic preference profiles.
Markus Brill, Jonas Israel, Evi Micha, Jannik Peters 0001
AAAI1
2022 Approval-Based Committee Voting under Incomplete Information
abstract
We investigate approval-based committee voting with incomplete information about the approval preferences of voters. We consider several models of incompleteness where each voter partitions the set of candidates into approved, disapproved, and unknown candidates, possibly with ordinal preference constraints among candidates in the latter category. This captures scenarios where voters have not evaluated all candidates and/or it is unknown where voters draw the threshold between approved and disapproved candidates. We study the complexity of some fundamental computational problems for a number of classic approval-based committee voting rules including Proportional Approval Voting and Chamberlin-Courant. These problems include that of determining whether a given set of candidates is a possible or necessary winning committee and whether it forms a committee that possibly or necessarily satisfies representation axioms. We also consider the problem whether a given candidate is possibly or necessarily a member of the winning committee.
Aviram Imber, Jonas Israel, Markus Brill, Benny Kimelfeld
AAAI3
2022 Margin of victory for tournament solutions
Markus Brill, Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin, Warut Suksompong
Artif. Intell.1
2021 The Maximin Support Method: An Extension of the D'Hondt Method to Approval-Based Multiwinner Elections
abstract
We propose the maximin support method, a novel extension of the D'Hondt apportionment method to approval-based multiwinner elections. The maximin support method is a sequential procedure that aims to maximize the support of the least supported elected candidate. It can be computed efficiently and satisfies (adjusted versions of) the main properties of the original D'Hondt method: house monotonicity, population monotonicity, and proportional representation. We also establish a close relationship between the maximin support method and alternative D'Hondt extensions due to Phragmén.
Luis Sánchez-Fernández 0001, Norberto Fernández García, Jesús Arias-Fisteus, Markus Brill
AAAI4
2021 Margin of Victory in Tournaments: Structural and Experimental Results
abstract
Tournament solutions are standard tools for identifying winners based on pairwise comparisons between competing alternatives. The recently studied notion of margin of victory (MoV) offers a general method for refining the winner set of any given tournament solution, thereby increasing the discriminative power of the solution. In this paper, we reveal a number of structural insights on the MoV by investigating fundamental properties such as monotonicity and consistency with respect to the covering relation. Furthermore, we provide experimental evidence on the extent to which the MoV notion refines winner sets in tournaments generated according to various stochastic models.
Markus Brill, Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin, Warut Suksompong
AAAI1
2021 From Computational Social Choice to Digital Democracy
abstract
Digital Democracy (aka e-democracy or interactive democracy) aims to enhance democratic decision-making processes by utilizing digital technology. A common goal of these approaches is to make collective decision-making more engaging, inclusive, and responsive to participants' opinions. For example, online decision-making platforms often provide much more flexibility and interaction possibilities than traditional democratic systems. It is without doubt that the successful design of digital democracy systems presents a multidisciplinary research challenge. I argue that tools and techniques from computational social choice should be employed to aid the design of online decision-making platforms and other digital democracy systems.
Markus Brill
IJCAI1
2021 Dynamic Proportional Rankings
abstract
Proportional ranking rules aggregate approval-style preferences of agents into a collective ranking such that groups of agents with similar preferences are adequately represented. Motivated by the application of live Q&A platforms, where submitted questions need to be ranked based on the interests of the audience, we study a dynamic extension of the proportional rankings setting. In our setting, the goal is to maintain the proportionality of a ranking when alternatives (i.e., questions)---not necessarily from the top of the ranking---get selected sequentially. We propose generalizations of well-known aggregation rules to this setting and study their monotonicity and proportionality properties. We also evaluate the performance of these rules experimentally, using realistic probabilistic assumptions on the selection procedure.
Jonas Israel, Markus Brill
IJCAI2
2020 Approval-Based Apportionment
abstract
In the apportionment problem, a fixed number of seats must be distributed among parties in proportion to the number of voters supporting each party. We study a generalization of this setting, in which voters cast approval ballots over parties, such that each voter can support multiple parties. This approval-based apportionment setting generalizes traditional apportionment and is a natural restriction of approval-based multiwinner elections, where approval ballots range over individual candidates. Using techniques from both apportionment and multiwinner elections, we are able to provide representation guarantees that are currently out of reach in the general setting of multiwinner elections: First, we show that core-stable committees are guaranteed to exist and can be found in polynomial time. Second, we demonstrate that extended justified representation is compatible with committee monotonicity.
Markus Brill, Paul Gölz, Dominik Peters, Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin, Kai Wilker
AAAI1
2020 Refining Tournament Solutions via Margin of Victory
abstract
Tournament solutions are frequently used to select winners from a set of alternatives based on pairwise comparisons between alternatives. Prior work has shown that several common tournament solutions tend to select large winner sets and therefore have low discriminative power. In this paper, we propose a general framework for refining tournament solutions. In order to distinguish between winning alternatives, and also between non-winning ones, we introduce the notion of margin of victory (MoV) for tournament solutions. MoV is a robustness measure for individual alternatives: For winners, the MoV captures the distance from dropping out of the winner set, and for non-winners, the distance from entering the set. In each case, distance is measured in terms of which pairwise comparisons would have to be reversed in order to achieve the desired outcome. For common tournament solutions, including the top cycle, the uncovered set, and the Banks set, we determine the complexity of computing the MoV and provide worst-case bounds on the MoV for both winners and non-winners. Our results can also be viewed from the perspective of bribery and manipulation.
Markus Brill, Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin, Warut Suksompong
AAAI1
2019 Exact mean computation in dynamic time warping spaces
abstract
Averaging time series under dynamic time warping is an important tool for improving nearest-neighbor classifiers and formulating centroid-based clustering. The most promising approach poses time series averaging as the problem of minimizing a Fréchet function. Minimizing the Fréchet function is NP-hard and so far solved by several heuristics and inexact strategies. Our contributions are as follows: we first discuss some inaccuracies in the literature on exact mean computation in dynamic time warping spaces. Then we propose an exponential-time dynamic program for computing a global minimum of the Fréchet function. The proposed algorithm is useful for benchmarking and evaluating known heuristics. In addition, we present an exact polynomial-time algorithm for the special case of binary time series. Based on the proposed exponential-time dynamic program, we empirically study properties like uniqueness and length of a mean, which are of interest for devising better heuristics. Experimental evaluations indicate substantial deficits of state-of-the-art heuristics in terms of their output quality.
Markus Brill, Till Fluschnik, Vincent Froese, Brijnesh J. Jain, Rolf Niedermeier, David Schultz
Data Min. Knowl. Discov.1
2018 Pairwise Liquid Democracy
abstract
In a liquid democracy, voters can either vote directly or delegate their vote to another voter of their choice. We consider ordinal elections, and study a model of liquid democracy in which voters specify partial orders and use several delegates to refine them. This flexibility, however, comes at a price, as individual rationality (in the form of transitive preferences) can no longer be guaranteed. We discuss ways to detect and overcome such complications. Based on the framework of distance rationalization, we introduce novel variants of voting rules that are tailored to the liquid democracy context.
Markus Brill, Nimrod Talmon
IJCAI1
2018 Exact Mean Computation in Dynamic Time Warping Spaces
Markus Brill, Till Fluschnik, Vincent Froese, Brijnesh J. Jain, Rolf Niedermeier, David Schultz
SDM1
2017 Phragmén's Voting Methods and Justified Representation
abstract
In the late 19th century, Lars Edvard Phragmén proposed a load-balancing approach for selecting committees based on approval ballots. We consider three committee voting rules resulting from this approach: two optimization variants one minimizing the maximal load and one minimizing the variance of loads —and a sequential variant. We study Phragmén's methods from an axiomatic point of view, focussing on justified representation and related properties that have recently been introduced by Aziz et al. (2015a) and Sánchez-Fernández et al. (2017). We show that the sequential variant satisfies proportional justified representation, making it the first known polynomial-time computable method with this property. Moreover, we show that the optimization variants satisfy perfect representation. We also analyze the com- putational complexity of Phragmén's methods and provide mixed-integer programming based algorithms for computing them.
Markus Brill, Rupert Freeman, Svante Janson, Martin Lackner
AAAI1
2017 Multiwinner Approval Rules as Apportionment Methods
abstract
We establish a link between multiwinner elections and apportionment problems by showing how approval-based multiwinner election rules can be interpreted as methods of apportionment. We consider several multi-winner rules and observe that some, but not all, of them induce apportionment methods that are well established in the literature and in the actual practice of proportional representation. For instance, we show that Proportional Approval Voting induces the D'Hondt method and that Monroe's rule induces the largest remainder method. We also consider properties of apportionment methods and exhibit multiwinner rules that induce apportionment methods satisfying these properties.
Markus Brill, Jean-François Laslier, Piotr Skowron 0001
AAAI1
2017 Proportional Rankings
abstract
We extend the principle of proportional representation to rankings: given approval preferences, we aim to generate aggregate rankings so that cohesive groups of voters are represented proportionally in each initial segment of the ranking. Such rankings are desirable in situations where initial segments of different lengths may be relevant, e.g., in recommender systems, for hiring decisions, or for the presentation of competing proposals on a liquid democracy platform. We define what it means for rankings to be proportional, provide bounds for well-known aggregation rules, and experimentally evaluate the performance of these rules.
Piotr Skowron 0001, Martin Lackner, Markus Brill, Dominik Peters, Edith Elkind
IJCAI3
2016 Computing Possible and Necessary Equilibrium Actions (and Bipartisan Set Winners)
abstract
In many multiagent environments, a designer has some, but limited control over the game being played. In this paper, we formalize this by considering incompletely specified games, in which some entries of the payoff matrices can be chosen from a specified set. We show that it is NP-hard for the designer to make this choices optimally, even in zero-sum games. In fact, it is already intractable to decide whether a given action is (potentially or necessarily) played in equilibrium. We also consider incompletely specified symmetric games in which all completions are required to be symmetric. Here, hardness holds even in weak tournament games (symmetric zero-sum games whose entries are all -1, 0, or 1) and in tournament games (symmetric zero-sum games whose non-diagonal entries are all -1 or 1). The latter result settles the complexity of the possible and necessary winner problems for a social-choice-theoretic solution concept known as the bipartisan set. We finally give a mixed-integer linear programming formulation for weak tournament games and evaluate it experimentally.
Markus Brill, Rupert Freeman, Vincent Conitzer
AAAI1
2016 Rules for Choosing Societal Tradeoffs
abstract
We study the societal tradeoffs problem, where a set of voters each submit their ideal tradeoff value between each pair of activities (e.g., "using a gallon of gasoline is as bad as creating 2 bags of landfill trash"), and these are then aggregated into the societal tradeoff vector using a rule. We introduce the family of distance-based rules and show that these can be justified as maximum likelihood estimators of the truth. Within this family, we single out the logarithmic distance-based rule as especially appealing based on a social-choice-theoretic axiomatization. We give an efficient algorithm for executing this rule as well as an approximate hill climbing algorithm, and evaluate these experimentally.
Vincent Conitzer, Rupert Freeman, Markus Brill, Yuqian Li 0002
AAAI3
2016 Pairwise Diffusion of Preference Rankings in Social Networks
Markus Brill, Edith Elkind, Ulle Endriss, Umberto Grandi
IJCAI1
2015 Justified Representation in Approval-Based Committee Voting
abstract
We consider approval-based committee voting, i.e., the setting where each voter approves a subset of candidates, and these votes are then used to select a fixed-size set of winners (committee). We propose a natural axiom for this setting, which we call justified representation (JR). This axiom requires that if a large enough group of voters exhibits agree- ment by supporting the same candidate, then at least one voter in this group has an approved candidate in the winning committee. We show that for every list of ballots it is possible to select a committee that provides JR. We then check if this axiom is fulfilled by well-known approval-based voting rules. We show that the answer is negative for most of the rules we consider, with notable exceptions of PAV (Proportional Approval Voting), an extreme version of RAV (Reweighted Approval Voting), and, for a restricted preference domain, MAV (Minimax Approval Voting). We then introduce a stronger version of the JR axiom, which we call extended justified representation (EJR), and show that PAV satisfies EJR, while other rules do not. We also consider several other questions related to JR and EJR, including the relationship between JR/EJR and unanimity, and the complexity of the associated algorithmic problems.
Haris Aziz 0001, Markus Brill, Vincent Conitzer, Edith Elkind, Rupert Freeman, Toby Walsh
AAAI2
2015 Strategic Voting and Strategic Candidacy
abstract
Models of strategic candidacy analyze the incentives of candidates to run in an election. Most work on this topic assumes that strategizing only takes place among candidates, whereas voters vote truthfully. In this paper, we extend the analysis to also include strategic behavior on the part of the voters. (We also study cases where only candidates or only voters are strategic.) We consider two settings in which strategic voting is well-defined and has a natural interpretation: majority-consistent voting with single-peaked preferences and voting by successive elimination. In the former setting, we analyze the type of strategic behavior required in order to guarantee desirable voting outcomes. In the latter setting, we determine the complexity of computing the set of potential outcomes if both candidates and voters act strategically.
Markus Brill, Vincent Conitzer
AAAI1
2015 Possible and Necessary Winners of Partial Tournaments
abstract
We study the problem of computing possible and necessary winners for partially specified weighted and unweighted tournaments. This problem arises naturally in elections with incompletely specified votes, partially completed sports competitions, and more generally in any scenario where the outcome of some pairwise comparisons is not yet fully known. We specifically consider a number of well-known solution concepts---including the uncovered set, Borda, ranked pairs, and maximin---and show that for most of them, possible and necessary winners can be identified in polynomial time. These positive algorithmic results stand in sharp contrast to earlier results concerning possible and necessary winners given partially specified preference profiles.
Haris Aziz 0001, Markus Brill, Felix A. Fischer, Paul Harrenstein, Jérôme Lang, Hans Georg Seedig
J. Artif. Intell. Res.2
2015 Bypassing Combinatorial Protections: Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Single-Peaked Electorates
abstract
For many election systems, bribery (and related) attacks have been shown NP-hard using constructions on combinatorially rich structures such as partitions and covers. This paper shows that for voters who follow the most central political-science model of electorates---single-peaked preferences---those hardness protections vanish. By using single-peaked preferences to simplify combinatorial covering challenges, we for the first time show that NP-hard bribery problems---including those for Kemeny and Llull elections---fall to polynomial time for single-peaked electorates. By using single-peaked preferences to simplify combinatorial partition challenges, we for the first time show that NP-hard partition-of-voters problems fall to polynomial time for single-peaked electorates. We show that for single-peaked electorates, the winner problems for Dodgson and Kemeny elections, though Theta-two-complete in the general case, fall to polynomial time. And we completely classify the complexity of weighted coalition manipulation for scoring protocols in single-peaked electorates.
Felix Brandt 0001, Markus Brill, Edith Hemaspaandra, Lane A. Hemaspaandra
J. Artif. Intell. Res.2
2014 Extending Tournament Solutions
abstract
An important subclass of social choice functions, so-called majoritarian (or C1) functions, only take into account the pairwise majority relation between alternatives. In the absence of majority ties--e.g., when there is an odd number of agents with linear preferences--the majority relation is antisymmetric and complete and can thus conveniently be represented by a tournament. Tournaments have a rich mathematical theory and many formal results for majoritarian functions assume that the majority relation constitutes a tournament. Moreover, most majoritarian functions have only been defined for tournaments and allow for a variety of generalizations to unrestricted preference profiles, none of which can be seen as the unequivocal extension of the original function. In this paper, we argue that restricting attention to tournaments is justified by the existence of a conservative extension, which inherits most of the commonly considered properties from its underlying tournament solution.
Felix Brandt 0001, Markus Brill, Paul Harrenstein
AAAI2
2014 On the Axiomatic Characterization of Runoff Voting Rules
abstract
Runoff voting rules such as single transferable vote (STV) and Baldwin's rule are of particular interest in computational social choice due to their recursive nature and hardness of manipulation, as well as in (human) practice because they are relatively easy to understand. However, they are not known for their compliance with desirable axiomatic properties, which we attempt to rectify here. We characterize runoff rules that are based on scoring rules using two axioms: a weakening of local independence of irrelevant alternatives and a variant of population-consistency. We then show, as our main technical result, that STV is the only runoff scoring rule satisfying an independence-of-clones property. Furthermore, we provide axiomatizations of Baldwin's rule and Coombs' rule.
Rupert Freeman, Markus Brill, Vincent Conitzer
AAAI2
2013 The Computational Complexity of Random Serial Dictatorship
Haris Aziz 0001, Felix Brandt 0001, Markus Brill
WINE3
2012 The Price of Neutrality for the Ranked Pairs Method
abstract
The complexity of the winner determination problem has been studied for almost all common voting rules. A notable exception, possibly caused by some confusion regarding its exact definition, is the method of ranked pairs. The original version of the method, due to Tideman, yields a social preference function that is irresolute and neutral. A variant introduced subsequently uses an exogenously given tie-breaking rule and therefore fails neutrality. The latter variant is the one most commonly studied in the area of computational social choice, and it is easy to see that its winner determination problem is computationally tractable. We show that by contrast, computing the set of winners selected by Tideman's original ranked pairs method is NP-complete, thus revealing a trade-off between tractability and neutrality. In addition, several known results concerning the hardness of manipulation and the complexity of computing possible and necessary winners are shown to follow as corollaries from our findings.
Markus Brill, Felix A. Fischer
AAAI1
2012 Computing dominance-based solution concepts
abstract
Two common criticisms of Nash equilibrium are its dependence on very demanding epistemic assumptions and its computational intractability. We study the computational properties of less demanding set-valued solution concepts that are based on varying notions of dominance. These concepts are intuitively appealing, they always exist, and admit unique minimal solutions in important subclasses of games. Examples include Shapley's saddles, Harsanyi and Selten's primitive formations, Basu and Weibull's CURB sets, and Dutta and Laslier's minimal covering sets. We propose two generic algorithms for computing these concepts and investigate for which classes of games and which properties of the underlying dominance notion the algorithms are sound and efficient.
Felix Brandt 0001, Markus Brill
EC2
2011 On the Fixed-Parameter Tractability of Composition-Consistent Tournament Solutions
Felix Brandt 0001, Markus Brill, Hans Georg Seedig
IJCAI2
2011 Necessary and sufficient conditions for the strategyproofness of irresolute social choice functions
abstract
While the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem states that every non-dictatorial and resolute, i.e., single-valued, social choice function is manipulable, it was recently shown that a number of appealing irresolute Condorcet extensions are strategyproof according to Kelly's preference extension. In this paper, we study whether these results carry over to stronger preference extensions due to Fishburn and Gärdenfors. For both preference extensions, we provide sufficient conditions for strategyproofness and identify social choice functions that satisfy these conditions, answering a question by Gärdenfors [15] in the affirmative. We also show that some more discriminatory social choice functions fail to satisfy necessary conditions for strategyproofness.
Felix Brandt 0001, Markus Brill
TARK2
2011 The Computational Complexity of Weak Saddles
Felix Brandt 0001, Markus Brill, Felix A. Fischer, Jan Hoffmann 0002
Theory Comput. Syst.2
2011 On the Complexity of Iterated Weak Dominance in Constant-Sum Games
Felix Brandt 0001, Markus Brill, Felix A. Fischer, Paul Harrenstein
Theory Comput. Syst.2
2010 Bypassing Combinatorial Protections: Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Single-Peaked Electorates
abstract
For many election systems, bribery (and related) attacks have been shown NP-hard using constructions on combinatorially rich structures such as partitions and covers. It is important to learn how robust these hardness protection results are, in order to find whether they can be relied on in practice. This paper shows that for voters who follow the most central political-science model of electorates — single-peaked preferences — those protections vanish. By using single-peaked preferences to simplify combinatorial covering challenges, we show that NP-hard bribery problems — including those for Kemeny and Llull elections- — fall to polynomial time. By using single-peaked preferences to simplify combinatorial partition challenges, we show that NP-hard partition-of-voters problems fall to polynomial time. We furthermore show that for single-peaked electorates, the winner problems for Dodgson and Kemeny elections, though Θ2p-complete in the general case, fall to polynomial time. And we completely classify the complexity of weighted coalition manipulation for scoring protocols in single-peaked electorates.
Felix Brandt 0001, Markus Brill, Edith Hemaspaandra, Lane A. Hemaspaandra
AAAI2
2009 The Computational Complexity of Weak Saddles
Felix Brandt 0001, Markus Brill, Felix A. Fischer, Jan Hoffmann 0002
SAGT2
2009 On the Complexity of Iterated Weak Dominance in Constant-Sum Games
Felix Brandt 0001, Markus Brill, Felix A. Fischer, Paul Harrenstein
SAGT2