Skip to main content

On the Discriminative Power of Tournament Solutions

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Operations Research Proceedings 2014

Part of the book series: Operations Research Proceedings ((ORP))

Abstract

Tournament solutions constitute an important class of social choice functions that only depend on the pairwise majority comparisons between alternatives. Recent analytical results have shown that several concepts with appealing axiomatic properties tend to not discriminate at all when the tournaments are chosen from the uniform distribution. This is in sharp contrast to empirical studies which have found that real-world preference profiles often exhibit Condorcet winners, i.e., alternatives that all tournament solutions select as the unique winner. In this work, we aim to fill the gap between these extremes by examining the distribution of the number of alternatives returned by common tournament solutions for empirical data as well as data generated according to stochastic preference models.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    See, e.g., [2], Chap. 6, Sect. 2.2.2.

References

  1. Berg, S.: Paradox of voting under an urn model: the effect of homogeneity. Public Choice 47, 377–387 (1985)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Brandt, F., Conitzer, V., Endriss, U.: Computational social choice. In: Weiß, G. (ed.) Multiagent Systems, chapter 6, 2nd edn., pp. 213–283. MIT Press (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Brandt, F., Dau, A., Seedig, H.G.: Bounds on the disparity and separation of tournament solutions. Discrete Appl. Math. 187, 41–49 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Critchlow, D.E., Fligner, M.A., Verducci, J.S.: Probability models on rankings. J. Math. Psychol. 35, 294–318 (1991)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Fey, M.: Choosing from a large tournament. Soc. Choice Welfare 31(2), 301–309 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Fisher, D.C., Reeves, R.B.: Optimal strategies for random tournament games. Linear Algebra Appl. 217, 83–85 (1995)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Laslier, J.-F.: Tournament Solutions and Majority Voting. Springer (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Laslier, J.-F.: In silico voting experiments. In: Laslier, J.-F., Sanver, M.R. (eds.) Handbook on Approval Voting, chapter 13, pp. 311–335. Springer-Verlag (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Mallows, C.L.: Non-null ranking models. Biometrika 44(1/2), 114–130 (1957)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Mattei, N., Walsh, T.: PrefLib: A library for preference data. In: Proceedings of 3rd ADT, vol. 8176 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), pp. 259–270. Springer (2013). http://www.preflib.org

  11. McCabe-Dansted, J.C., Slinko, A.: Exploratory analysis of similarities between social choice rules. Group Decis. Negot. 15(1), 77–107 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Ordeshook, P. C.: The spatial analysis of elections and committees: four decades of research. Technical report, California Institute of Technology. Mimeo (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Regenwetter, M., Grofman, B., Marley, A.A.J., Tsetlin, I.M.: Behavioral Social Choice: Probabilistic Models, Statistical Inference, and Applications. Cambridge University Press (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Scott, A., Fey, M.: The minimal covering set in large tournaments. Soc. Choice Welfare 38(1), 1–9 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Seedig, H.G.: Majority Relations and Tournament Solutions: A Computational Study. Ph.D. thesis, Technische Universität München (2015)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Felix Brandt or Hans Georg Seedig .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Brandt, F., Seedig, H.G. (2016). On the Discriminative Power of Tournament Solutions. In: Lübbecke, M., Koster, A., Letmathe, P., Madlener, R., Peis, B., Walther, G. (eds) Operations Research Proceedings 2014. Operations Research Proceedings. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28697-6_8

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics