Selecting the Most Conflicting Pair of Candidates

Selecting the Most Conflicting Pair of Candidates

Théo Delemazure, Łukasz Janeczko, Andrzej Kaczmarczyk, Stanisław Szufa

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2766-2773. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/306

We study committee elections from a perspective of finding the most conflicting candidates, that is, candidates that imply the largest amount of conflict, as per voter preferences. By proposing basic axioms to capture this objective, we show that none of the prominent multiwinner voting rules meet them. Consequently, we design committee voting rules compliant with our desiderata, introducing conflictual voting rules. A subsequent deepened analysis sheds more light on how they operate. Our investigation identifies various aspects of conflict, for which we come up with relevant axioms and quantitative measures, which may be of independent interest. We support our theoretical study with experiments on both real-life and synthetic data.
Keywords:
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Computational social choice