English

Optimal bounds for dissatisfaction in perpetual voting

Computer Science and Game Theory 2025-01-07 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

In perpetual voting, multiple decisions are made at different moments in time. Taking the history of previous decisions into account allows us to satisfy properties such as proportionality over periods of time. In this paper, we consider the following question: is there a perpetual approval voting method that guarantees that no voter is dissatisfied too many times? We identify a sufficient condition on voter behavior -- which we call 'bounded conflicts' condition -- under which a sublinear growth of dissatisfaction is possible. We provide a tight upper bound on the growth of dissatisfaction under bounded conflicts, using techniques from Kolmogorov complexity. We also observe that the approval voting with binary choices mimics the machine learning setting of prediction with expert advice. This allows us to present a voting method with sublinear guarantees on dissatisfaction under bounded conflicts, based on the standard techniques from prediction with expert advice.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.01969,
  title  = {Optimal bounds for dissatisfaction in perpetual voting},
  author = {Alexander Kozachinskiy and Alexander Shen and Tomasz Steifer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.01969},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Full version of the AAAI 2025 paper

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:55:42.107Z