English

Finding Possible Winners in Spatial Voting with Incomplete Information

Computer Science and Game Theory 2025-05-20 v1

Abstract

We consider a spatial voting model where both candidates and voters are positioned in the dd-dimensional Euclidean space, and each voter ranks candidates based on their proximity to the voter's ideal point. We focus on the scenario where the given information about the locations of the voters' ideal points is incomplete; for each dimension, only an interval of possible values is known. In this context, we investigate the computational complexity of determining the possible winners under positional scoring rules. Our results show that the possible winner problem in one dimension is solvable in polynomial time for all kk-truncated voting rules with constant kk. Moreover, for some scoring rules for which the possible winner problem is NP-complete, such as approval voting for any dimension or kk-approval for d2d \geq 2 dimensions, we give an FPT algorithm parameterized by the number of candidates. Finally, we classify tractable and intractable settings of the weighted possible winner problem in one dimension, and resolve the computational complexity of the weighted case for all two-valued positional scoring rules when d=1d=1.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.12451,
  title  = {Finding Possible Winners in Spatial Voting with Incomplete Information},
  author = {Hadas Shachnai and Rotem Shavitt and Andreas Wiese},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.12451},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:19:52.662Z