2019/11/27 by Xujin Chen, Minming Li, Chen, Xujin +3
Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Auction Theory and Applications #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Game Theory and Applications #Game Theory and Voting Systems
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1911.12109
openalex publication_date 2019/11/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study single-candidate voting embedded in a metric space, where both voters and candidates are points in the space, and the distances between voters and candidates specify the voters' preferences over candidates. In the voting, each voter is asked to submit her favorite candidate. Given the collection of favorite candidates, a mechanism for eliminating the least popular candidate finds a committee containing all candidates but the one to be eliminated. Each committee is associated with a social value that is the sum of the costs (utilities) it imposes (provides) to the voters. We design mechanisms for finding a committee to optimize the social value. We measure the quality of a mechanism by its distortion, defined as the worst-case ratio between the social value of the committee found by the mechanism and the optimal one. We establish new upper and lower bounds on the distortion of mechanisms in this single-candidate voting, for both general metrics and well-motivated special cases.