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arXiv · 2310.14991

Deterministic Impartial Selection with Weights

Javier Cembrano·Svenja M. Griesbach·Maximilian J. Stahlberg
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Abstract

In the impartial selection problem, a subset of agents up to a fixed size $k$ among a group of $n$ is to be chosen based on votes cast by the agents themselves. A selection mechanism is impartial if no agent can influence its own chance of being selected by changing its vote. It is $\alpha$-optimal if, for every instance, the ratio between the votes received by the selected subset is at least a fraction of $\alpha$ of the votes received by the subset of size $k$ with the highest number of votes. We study deterministic impartial mechanisms in a more general setting with arbitrarily weighted votes and provide the first approximation guarantee, roughly $1/\lceil 2n/k\rceil$. When the number of agents to select is large enough compared to the total number of agents, this yields an improvement on the previously best known approximation ratio of $1/k$ for the unweighted setting. We further show that our mechanism can be adapted to the impartial assignment problem, in which multiple sets of up to $k$ agents are to be selected, with a loss in the approximation ratio of $1/2$.

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Javier Cembrano, Svenja M. Griesbach, Maximilian J. Stahlberg. 2023-10-23. Deterministic Impartial Selection with Weights. https://doi.org/10.1145/3677177

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