Analyzing power in weighted voting games with super-increasing weights

Yoram Bachrach, Yuval Filmus, Joel Oren, Yair Zick

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

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

Weighted voting games (WVGs) are a class of cooperative games that capture settings of group decision making in various domains, such as parliaments or committees. Earlier work has revealed that the effective decision making power, or influence of agents in WVGs is not necessarily proportional to their weight. This gave rise to measures of influence for WVGs. However, recent work in the algorithmic game theory community have shown that computing agent voting power is computationally intractable. In an effort to characterize WVG instances for which polynomial-time computation of voting power is possible, several classes of WVGs have been proposed and analyzed in the literature. One of the most prominent of these are super increasing weight sequences. Recent papers show that when agent weights are super-increasing, it is possible to compute the agents’ voting power (as measured by the Shapley value) in polynomial-time. We provide the first set of explicit closed-form formulas for the Shapley value for super-increasing sequences. We bound the effects of changes to the quota, and relate the behavior of voting power to a novel function. This set of results constitutes a complete characterization of the Shapley value in weighted voting games, and answers a number of open questions presented in previous work.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAlgorithmic Game Theory - 9th International Symposium, SAGT 2016, Proceedings
EditorsMartin Gairing, Rahul Savani
Pages169-181
Number of pages13
DOIs
StatePublished - 2016
Event9th International Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory, SAGT 2016 - Liverpool, United Kingdom
Duration: 19 Sep 201621 Sep 2016

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9928 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference9th International Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory, SAGT 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityLiverpool
Period19/09/1621/09/16

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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