English

Free-Riding in Multi-Issue Decisions

Computer Science and Game Theory 2025-10-22 v2

Abstract

Voting in multi-issue domains allows for compromise outcomes that satisfy all voters to some extent, but such fairness considerations open the possibility of a special form of manipulation: free-riding, where voters untruthfully oppose a popular opinion in one issue to receive increased consideration in other issues; we study under which conditions this is possible and show that even weak fairness considerations enable free-riding, and through computational and experimental analysis, we find that while free-riding in multi-issue domains is often possible, it comes at a non-negligible individual risk for voters, making its allure smaller than one could intuitively assume.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.08194,
  title  = {Free-Riding in Multi-Issue Decisions},
  author = {Martin Lackner and Jan Maly and Oliviero Nardi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.08194},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

This is an extended version of the publication with the same name in the proceedings of AAMAS 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:48:28.513Z