DiRe Committee : Diversity and Representation Constraints in Multiwinner Elections
Kunal Relia

TL;DR
This paper introduces a new model for multiwinner elections that considers both candidate and voter attributes to ensure fair diversity and representation, analyzing its computational complexity and proposing an efficient heuristic algorithm.
Contribution
It develops the DiRe Committee WinnerDetermination model, highlighting the importance of separately considering candidate diversity and voter representation in multiwinner elections.
Findings
Heuristic algorithm finds solutions in under two minutes for most instances.
The model emphasizes the distinction between diversity and representation.
Empirical analysis shows trade-offs between feasibility, utility, and running time.
Abstract
The study of fairness in multiwinner elections focuses on settings where candidates have attributes. However, voters may also be divided into predefined populations under one or more attributes (e.g., "California" and "Illinois" populations under the "state" attribute), which may be same or different from candidate attributes. The models that focus on candidate attributes alone may systematically under-represent smaller voter populations. Hence, we develop a model, DiRe Committee WinnerDetermination (DRCWD), which delineates candidate and voter attributes to select a committee by specifying diversity and representation constraints and a voting rule. We analyze its computational complexity, inapproximability, and parameterized complexity. We develop a heuristic-based algorithm, which finds the winning DiRe committee in under two minutes on 63% of the instances of synthetic datasets and…
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Taxonomy
TopicsElectoral Systems and Political Participation · Game Theory and Voting Systems
