Ranking Sets of Objects: The Complexity of Avoiding Impossibility Results

TL;DR

This paper investigates the computational complexity of recognizing families of object sets where certain preference axioms can be simultaneously satisfied, revealing high complexity levels for various cases relevant to AI applications.

Contribution

It establishes the complexity classifications for recognizing such families, including $ ext{Pi}_2^p$-completeness and coNP-completeness, depending on the conditions.

Findings

Deciding joint satisfiability for all linear orders is $ ext{Pi}_2^p$-complete.

Recognition problem is coNP-complete when the lifted order can be incomplete.

Complexity increases exponentially with succinct domain restrictions.

Abstract

The problem of lifting a preference order on a set of objects to a preference order on a family of subsets of this set is a fundamental problem with a wide variety of applications in AI. The process is often guided by axioms postulating properties the lifted order should have. Well-known impossibility results by Kannai and Peleg and by Barber\`a and Pattanaik tell us that some desirable axioms - namely dominance and (strict) independence - are not jointly satisfiable for any linear order on the objects if all non-empty sets of objects are to be ordered. On the other hand, if not all non-empty sets of objects are to be ordered, the axioms are jointly satisfiable for all linear orders on the objects for some families of sets. Such families are very important for applications as they allow for the use of lifted orders, for example, in combinatorial voting. In this paper, we determine the computational complexity of recognizing such families. We show that it is $\Pi_2^p$-complete to decide for a given family of subsets whether dominance and independence or dominance and strict independence are jointly satisfiable for all linear orders on the objects if the lifted order needs to be total. Furthermore, we show that the problem remains coNP-complete if the lifted order can be incomplete. Additionally, we show that the complexity of these problem can increase exponentially if the family of sets is not given explicitly but via a succinct domain restriction. Finally, we show that it is NP-complete to decide for family of subsets whether dominance and independence or dominance and strict independence are jointly satisfiable for at least one linear orders on the objects.