The Complexity of Campaigning

Cory Siler, Luke Harold Miles, Judy Goldsmith

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

In “The Logic of Campaigning”, Dean and Parikh consider a candidate making campaign statements to appeal to the voters. They model these statements as Boolean formulas over variables that represent stances on the issues, and study optimal candidate strategies under three proposed models of voter preferences based on the assignments that satisfy these formulas. We prove that voter utility evaluation is computationally hard under these preference models (in one case, P -hard), along with certain problems related to candidate strategic reasoning. Our results raise questions about the desirable characteristics of a voter preference model and to what extent a polynomial-time-evaluable function can capture them.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAlgorithmic Decision Theory - 5th International Conference, ADT 2017, Proceedings
EditorsJorg Rothe
Pages153-165
Number of pages13
DOIs
StatePublished - 2017
Event5th International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory, ADT 2017 - Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Duration: Oct 25 2017Oct 27 2017

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume10576 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference5th International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory, ADT 2017
Country/TerritoryLuxembourg
CityLuxembourg
Period10/25/1710/27/17

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.

Funding

Acknowledgments. The authors thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and thank Alec Gilbert for catching errors in a late draft. All remaining errors are the responsibility of the authors. This material is based upon work partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. IIS-1646887 and No. IIS-1649152. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

FundersFunder number
National Science Foundation (NSF)IIS-1646887

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Theoretical Computer Science
    • General Computer Science

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