2022/04/22 by Egor Ianovski, Ianovski, Egor, Daria Teplova +3
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Game Theory and Voting Systems
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.10897
openalex publication_date 2022/04/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Strategic voting, or manipulation, is the process by which a voter misrepresents his preferences in an attempt to elect an outcome that he considers preferable to the outcome under sincere voting. It is generally agreed that manipulation is a negative feature of elections, and much effort has been spent on gauging the vulnerability of voting rules to manipulation. However, the question of why manipulation is actually bad is less commonly asked. One way to measure the effect of manipulation on an outcome is by comparing a numeric measure of social welfare under sincere behaviour to that in the presence of a manipulator. In this paper we conduct numeric experiments to assess the effects of manipulation on social welfare under scoring rules. We find that manipulation is usually negative, and in most cases the optimum rule with a manipulator is different to the one with sincere voters.