Information, interaction and manipulation in voting

Maastricht : Maastricht University, 2023.

Veselova Y. A.

Collective decision-making is a part of everyday life in modern society. People invented a variety of voting procedures for aggregating individual preferences into a collective choice. However, the problem is that people can misrepresent their preferences in order to achieve a more preferable voting result. This phenomenon is called manipulation and is considered negative since due to manipulation the voting result becomes biased. The following thesis considers several models of manipulation in voting which take into account possible incompleteness of information available to voters and voters’ interaction. It is demonstrated that public information and voters’ view of the behavior of others are the crucial aspects that affect individual manipulation incentives. The thesis provides an extensive study of conditions that allow for manipulation and those restricting it.

Keywords: voting, manipulation, Computational Social Choice