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Search versus Decision for Election Manipulation Problems

Published: 11 February 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Most theoretical definitions about the complexity of manipulating elections focus on the decision problem of recognizing which instances can be successfully manipulated rather than the search problem of finding the successful manipulative actions. Since the latter is a far more natural goal for manipulators, that definitional focus may be misguided if these two complexities can differ. Our main result is that they probably do differ: If P ≠ NP ∩ coNP (which itself is well known to hold if integer factoring is hard), then for election manipulation, election bribery, and some types of election control, there are election systems for which the problem of recognizing which instances can be successfully manipulated is polynomial-time solvable, yet the task of producing the successful manipulations cannot be done in polynomial time.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Computation Theory
ACM Transactions on Computation Theory  Volume 12, Issue 1
March 2020
199 pages
ISSN:1942-3454
EISSN:1942-3462
DOI:10.1145/3376904
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 11 February 2020
Accepted: 01 September 2019
Revised: 01 July 2019
Received: 01 November 2018
Published in TOCT Volume 12, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. NP intersect coNP
  2. Structural complexity theory
  3. borodin-demers theorem
  4. elections
  5. search versus decision
  6. typical-case complexity

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Separations and Collapses in Computational Social ChoiceProceedings of the 2023 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems10.5555/3545946.3599160(3026-3028)Online publication date: 30-May-2023
  • (2023)Search versus Search for Collapsing Electoral Control TypesProceedings of the 2023 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems10.5555/3545946.3599042(2682-2684)Online publication date: 30-May-2023
  • (2023)Separating and Collapsing Electoral Control TypesProceedings of the 2023 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems10.5555/3545946.3598833(1743-1751)Online publication date: 30-May-2023
  • (2022)A Tale of HodgeRank and Spectral Method: Target Attack Against Rank Aggregation Is the Fixed Point of Adversarial GameIEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence10.1109/TPAMI.2022.3190939(1-18)Online publication date: 2022
  • (2021)The opacity of backbonesInformation and Computation10.1016/j.ic.2021.104772281:COnline publication date: 1-Dec-2021
  • (2021)Control complexity in Borda electionsArtificial Intelligence10.1016/j.artint.2021.103508298:COnline publication date: 1-Sep-2021
  • (2021)Existence versus exploitation: the opacity of backdoors and backbonesProgress in Artificial Intelligence10.1007/s13748-021-00234-610:3(297-308)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2021
  • (2021)Towards completing the puzzle: complexity of control by replacing, adding, and deleting candidates or votersAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-021-09523-935:2Online publication date: 29-Jul-2021
  • (2020)Control in the presence of manipulators: cooperative and competitive casesAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-020-09475-634:2Online publication date: 28-Aug-2020

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