English

Paradoxes in Sequential Voting

Computer Science and Game Theory 2019-04-19 v2

Abstract

We analyse strategic, complete information, sequential voting with ordinal preferences over the alternatives. We consider several voting mechanisms: plurality voting and approval voting with deterministic or uniform tie-breaking rules. We show that strategic voting in these voting procedures may lead to a very undesirable outcome: Condorcet winning alternative might be rejected, Condorcet losing alternative might be elected, and Pareto dominated alternative might be elected. These undesirable phenomena occur already with four alternatives and a small number of voters. For the case of three alternatives we present positive and negative results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1807.03979,
  title  = {Paradoxes in Sequential Voting},
  author = {Oren Dean and Yakov Babichenko and Moshe Tennenholtz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.03979},
  year   = {2019}
}