English

Power Distribution in Randomized Weighted Voting: the Effects of the Quota

Computer Science and Game Theory 2014-08-05 v1

Abstract

We study the Shapley value in weighted voting games. The Shapley value has been used as an index for measuring the power of individual agents in decision-making bodies and political organizations, where decisions are made by a majority vote process. We characterize the impact of changing the quota (i.e., the minimum number of seats in the parliament that are required to form a coalition) on the Shapley values of the agents. Contrary to previous studies, which assumed that the agent weights (corresponding to the size of a caucus or a political party) are fixed, we analyze new domains in which the weights are stochastically generated, modelling, for example, elections processes. We examine a natural weight generation process: the Balls and Bins model, with uniform as well as exponentially decaying probabilities. We also analyze weights that admit a super-increasing sequence, answering several open questions pertaining to the Shapley values in such games.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1408.0442,
  title  = {Power Distribution in Randomized Weighted Voting: the Effects of the Quota},
  author = {Joel Oren and Yuval Filmus and Yair Zick and Yoram Bachrach},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.0442},
  year   = {2014}
}