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Democratix: A Declarative Approach to Winner Determination

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Algorithmic Decision Theory (ADT 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9346))

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Abstract

Computing the winners of an election is an important task in voting and preference aggregation. The declarative nature of answer-set programming (ASP) and the performance of state-of-the-art solvers render ASP very well-suited to tackle this problem. In this work we present a novel, reduction-based approach for a variety of voting rules, ranging from tractable cases to problems harder than NP. The encoded voting rules are put together in the extensible tool Democratix, which handles the computation of winners and is also available as a web application. To learn more about the capabilities and limits of the approach, the encodings are evaluated thoroughly on real-world data as well as on random instances.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that these rules can be simplified by using the so-called choice rule (see, e.g., [11]). Currently, this construct is, however, not supported by all ASP solvers.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the anonymous COMSOC-2014 and ADT-2015 referees for their very helpful comments and suggestions. This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): P25518, P25607, Y968; and the German Research Foundation (DFG): ER 738/2–1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information Systems, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Günther Charwat & Andreas Pfandler

  2. School of Economic Disciplines, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany

    Andreas Pfandler

Authors
  1. Günther Charwat
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  2. Andreas Pfandler
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Günther Charwat or Andreas Pfandler .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of New South Wales, Kensington, Australia

    Toby Walsh

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Charwat, G., Pfandler, A. (2015). Democratix: A Declarative Approach to Winner Determination. In: Walsh, T. (eds) Algorithmic Decision Theory. ADT 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9346. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23114-3_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23114-3_16

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