Speaker: Arkadii Slinko (University of Auckland)

Title: “What Do Multiwinner Voting Rules Do? Some Simulations Over the Two-Dimensional Euclidean Domain”, joint work with Edith Elkind, Piotr Faliszewski, Jean-Francois Laslier, Piotr Skowron and Nimrod Talmon

Date, Time and Venue: Wednesday, 9 May 2018, 14:00-15:00, 260-319 [Business School Building, Level 3]

Abstract: We visualize aggregate outputs of several multiwinner voting rules—SNTV, STV, Bloc, k-Borda, Monroe, Chamberlin–Courant, and PAV—for elections generated according to the two-dimensional Euclidean model. We consider three applications of multiwinner voting, namely, parliamentary elections, portfolio/movie selection, and shortlisting, and we use our results to understand which of these rules seem to be best suited for each application. In particular, we show that STV (one of the few nontrivial rules used in real high-stake elections) exhibits excellent performance, whereas the Bloc rule (also often used in practice) performs poorly. We also visualise three approximation algorithms for the computationally hard Chamberlin–Courant and Monroe rules. Our results show that the best approximation algorithms on offer (one of which is introduced in this paper) can be safely used instead of the original rules themselves.

Everyone welcome!