English

Complexity of Unambiguous Problems in $\Sigma^P_2$

Computational Complexity 2026-04-02 v2 Computer Science and Game Theory

Abstract

Various practical problems within the class Σ2P\Sigma_{2}^P possess an unambiguity property, meaning that yes-instances correspond with a unique witness. The semantic class containing all unambiguous Σ2P\Sigma_{2}^P problems is denoted UΣ2PU\Sigma_{2}^P. Examples include the existence of (1) a dominating strategy in a game, (2) a Condorcet winner, (3) a strongly popular partition in hedonic games, and (4) a winner (source) in a tournament. The computational complexity of unambiguous problems is not well understood, leaving many questions unresolved. We address this gap in a broad complexity-theoretic sense; our main contributions consist of the following. - We identify three syntactic subclasses of UΣ2PU\Sigma_{2}^P associated with general properties of problems that guarantee uniqueness: Polynomial Tournament Winner (PTW), Polynomial Condorcet Winner (PCW), and Polynomial Majority Argument (PMA). - We establish complexity upper and lower bounds for our proposed classes. In particular, we show that they are all contained in S2PS_2^P and are thus significantly easier than the immediate Σ2P\Sigma_{2}^P upper bound. - We characterize the complexity of various practical problems using this framework. In particular, we resolve an open question by Brandt and Bullinger (JAIR '22) and Bullinger and Gilboa (IJCAI '25) concerning strong-popularity in additive hedonic games.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.19084,
  title  = {Complexity of Unambiguous Problems in $\Sigma^P_2$},
  author = {Matan Gilboa and Paul W. Goldberg and Elias Koutsoupias and Noam Nisan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.19084},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

59 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:58:46.764Z