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We study the complexity of determining a winning committee under the Chamberlin--Courant voting rule when voters preferences are single-crossing on a line, or, more generally, on a median graph (this class of graphs includes, e.g., trees and grids). For the line, Skowron et al. (2015) describe an $O(n^2mk)$ algorithm (where $n$, $m$, $k$ are the number of voters, the number of candidates and the committee size, respectively); we show that a simple tweak improves the time complexity to $O(nmk)$. We then improve this bound for $k=Omega(log n)$ by reducing our problem to the $k$-link path problem for DAGs with concave Monge weights, obtaining a $nm2^{Oleft(sqrt{log kloglog n}right)}$ algorithm for the general case and a nearly linear algorithm for the Borda misrepresentation function. For trees, we point out an issue with the algorithm proposed by Clearwater, Puppe and Slinko (2015), and develop a $O(nmk)$ algorithm for this case as well. For grids, we formulate a conjecture about the structure of optimal solutions, and describe a polynomial-time algorithm that finds a winning committee if this conjecture is true; we also explain how to convert this algorithm into a bicriterial approximation algorithm whose correctness does not depend on the conjecture.
The goal of multi-winner elections is to choose a fixed-size committee based on voters preferences. An important concern in this setting is representation: large groups of voters with cohesive preferences should be adequately represented by the election winners. Recently, Aziz et al. (2015a;2017) proposed two axioms that aim to capture this idea: justified representation (JR) and its strengthening extended justified representation (EJR). In this paper, we extend the work of Aziz et al. in several directions. First, we answer an open question of Aziz et al., by showing that Reweighted Approval Voting satisfies JR for $k=3, 4, 5$, but fails it for $kge 6$. Second, we observe that EJR is incompatible with the Perfect Representation criterion, which is important for many applications of multi-winner voting, and propose a relaxation of EJR, which we call Proportional Justified Representation (PJR). PJR is more demanding than JR, but, unlike EJR, it is compatible with perfect representation, and a committee that provides PJR can be computed in polynomial time if the committee size divides the number of voters. Moreover, just like EJR, PJR can be used to characterize the classic PAV rule in the class of weighted PAV rules. On the other hand, we show that EJR provides stronger guarantees with respect to average voter satisfaction than PJR does.
We investigate two systems of fully proportional representation suggested by Chamberlin Courant and Monroe. Both systems assign a representative to each voter so that the sum of misrepresentations is minimized. The winner determination problem for both systems is known to be NP-hard, hence this work aims at investigating whether there are variants of the proposed rules and/or specific electorates for which these problems can be solved efficiently. As a variation of these rules, instead of minimizing the sum of misrepresentations, we considered minimizing the maximal misrepresentation introducing effectively two new rules. In the general case these minimax
A preference profile is single-peaked on a tree if the candidate set can be equipped with a tree structure so that the preferences of each voter are decreasing from their top candidate along all paths in the tree. This notion was introduced by Demange (1982), and subsequently Trick (1989) described an efficient algorithm for deciding if a given profile is single-peaked on a tree. We study the complexity of multiwinner elections under several variants of the Chamberlin-Courant rule for preferences single-peaked on trees. We show that the egalitarian version of this problem admits a polynomial-time algorithm. For the utilitarian version, we prove that winner determination remains NP-hard, even for the Borda scoring function; however, a winning committee can be found in polynomial time if either the number of leaves or the number of internal vertices of the underlying tree is bounded by a constant. To benefit from these positive results, we need a procedure that can determine whether a given profile is single-peaked on a tree that has additional desirable properties (such as, e.g., a small number of leaves). To address this challenge, we develop a structural approach that enables us to compactly represent all trees with respect to which a given profile is single-peaked. We show how to use this representation to efficiently find the best tree for a given profile for use with our winner determination algorithms: Given a profile, we can efficiently find a tree with the minimum number of leaves, or a tree with the minimum number of internal vertices among trees on which the profile is single-peaked. We also consider several other optimization criteria for trees: for some we obtain polynomial-time algorithms, while for others we show NP-hardness results.
In this paper, we consider how to fairly allocate $m$ indivisible chores to a set of $n$ (asymmetric) agents. As exact fairness cannot be guaranteed, motivated by the extensive study of EF1, EFX and PROP1 allocations, we propose and study {em proportionality up to any item} (PROPX), and show that a PROPX allocation always exists. We argue that PROPX might be a more reliable relaxation for proportionality in practice than the commonly studied maximin share fairness (MMS) by the facts that (1) MMS allocations may not exist even with three agents, but PROPX allocations always exist even for the weighted case when agents have unequal obligation shares; (2) any PROPX allocation ensures 2-approximation for MMS, but an MMS allocation can be as bad as $Theta(n)$-approximation to PROPX. We propose two algorithms to compute PROPX allocations and each of them has its own merits. Our first algorithm is based on a recent refinement for the well-known procedure -- envy-cycle elimination, where the returned allocation is simultaneously PROPX and $4/3$-approximate MMS. A by-product result is that an exact EFX allocation for indivisible chores exists if all agents have the same ordinal preference over the chores, which might be of independent interest. The second algorithm is called bid-and-take, which applies to the weighted case. Furthermore, we study the price of fairness for (weighted) PROPX allocations, and show that the algorithm computes allocations with the optimal guarantee on the approximation ratio to the optimal social welfare without fairness constraints.
Participatory budgeting is a democratic process for allocating funds to projects based on the votes of members of the community. However, most input methods of voters preferences prevent the voters from expressing complex relationships among projects, leading to outcomes that do not reflect their preferences well enough. In this paper, we propose an input method that begins to address this challenge, by allowing participants to express substitutes over projects. Then, we extend a known aggregation mechanism from the literature (Rule X) to handle substitute projects. We prove that our extended rule preserves proportionality under natural conditions, and show empirically that it obtains substantially more welfare than the original mechanism on instances with substitutes.