"Voting on combinatorial domains: seven classes of solutions"

Speaker: Jerome Lang, Centre national de la recherche scientifique
http://www.irit.fr/recherches/RPDMP/persos/Jerome.html
Date: Thursday, 29 April 2010
Time: 4pm
Place: Ross 201

Abstract:

One of the hot topics in computational social choice is voting on a
set of alternatives that has a combinatorial structure: in other
words, the voters have to make a common decision on several possibly
related issues. For instance, the inhabitants of some local community
may have to make a joint decision over several related issues of local
interest, such as deciding whether some new public facility such as a
swimming pool or a tennis court should be built. Some of the voters
may have preferential dependencies, for instance, they may prefer the
tennis court to be built only if the swimming pool is not.  As soon as
voters have preferential dependencies between issues, decomposing the
problem into smaller subproblems, each one bearing on a single issue,
leads to so-called "multiple election paradoxes".

In this talk I will list seven possible ways of avoiding these
paradoxes, and discuss their pros and cons.