Strategic Voting in the Context of Negotiating Teams

A negotiating team is a group of two or more agents who join together as a single negotiating party because they share a common goal related to the negotiation. Since a negotiating team is composed of several stakeholders, represented as a single negotiating party, there is need for a voting rule for the team to reach decisions. In this paper, we investigate the problem of strategic voting in the context of negotiating teams. Specifically, we present a polynomial-time algorithm that finds a manipulation for a single voter when using a positional scoring rule. We show that the problem is still tractable when there is a coalition of manipulators that uses a x-approval rule. The coalitional manipulation problem becomes computationally hard when using Borda, but we provide a polynomial-time algorithm with the following guarantee: given a manipulable instance with k manipulators, the algorithm finds a successful manipulation with at most one additional manipulator. Our results hold for both constructive and destructive manipulations.