Strategic Voting and Candidacy

24^th April 2024, 15:00 6th Floor Conference Room 605, EEE
Dr. Maria Polukarov
King's College London

Abstract

Modern societies often need to make choices based on the desires and preferences of multiple stakeholders: such choices range from traffic policies in a local neighbourhood to joining or leaving major political or economic alliances. Similar challenges are faced by many organisations, both commercial and non-profit: examples include hiring decisions, identifying strategic priorities, and budget allocation. Likewise, independent artificial agents interacting in a common environment may need to agree on a joint plan of action or allocation of resources. In such contexts, voting protocols represent a central tool for collective decision-making.

We analyse voting scenarios from a game-theoretic perspective, viewing strategic parties as players and examining possible stable outcomes of their interaction (e.g., equilibria), both from a normative and from a computational perspective. Specifically, we model strategic behaviours by voters or candidates as voting (respectively, candidacy) games and study the existence and properties of stable game solutions, as well as their reachability by natural iterative processes, such as best-response dynamics or its restricted variants.

Biography

Dr Maria Polukarov is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Informatics at King's College London, where she leads the Distributed AI research group. Earlier, she was a faculty member and a postdoctoral researcher at University of Southampton. She obtained her PhD and MSc degrees in Operations Research from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and a BSc in Economics from Priazovsky State Technical University in Mariupol, Ukraine.