Complexity of Finding Equilibria of Plurality Voting Under Structured Preferences

Edith Elkind (University of Oxford), Evangelos Markakis (Athens University of Economics and Business), Svetlana Obraztsova (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Piotr Skowron (University of Oxford)

Abstract

We study the complexity of finding pure Nash equilibria in voting games over well-known restricted preference domains, such as the domains of single-peaked and single-crossing preferences. We focus on the Plurality rule, and, following the recent work of Elkind et al. [15], consider three popular tie-breaking rules (lexicographic, random-candidate, and random-voter) and two types of voters' attitude: lazy voters, who prefer to abstain when their vote cannot affect the election outcome, and truth-biased voters, who prefer to vote truthfully in such cases. Elkind et al. [15] have shown that for most of these combinations of tie-breaking rules and voters' attitudes finding a Nash equilibrium is NP-hard; in contrast, we demonstrate that in almost all cases this problem is tractable for preferences that are single-peaked or singlecrossing, under mild technical assumptions.