Strategyproof Social Decision Schemes on Super Condorcet Domains

TL;DR

This paper investigates strategyproof social decision schemes on the Condorcet domain, showing that for odd voters, such schemes are mixtures of dictatorships and the Condorcet rule, extending Gibbard's theorem.

Contribution

It characterizes strategyproof SDSs on the Condorcet domain, demonstrating maximality of this domain for attractive strategyproof schemes and extending existing theorems.

Findings

Strategyproof SDSs are mixtures of dictatorships and the Condorcet rule for odd voters.

The Condorcet domain is maximal for strategyproof SDSs with odd voters.

Group-strategyproof SDSs are characterized on the Condorcet domain.

Abstract

One of the central economic paradigms in multi-agent systems is that agents should not be better off by acting dishonestly. In the context of collective decision-making, this axiom is known as strategyproofness and turns out to be rather prohibitive, even when allowing for randomization. In particular, Gibbard's random dictatorship theorem shows that only rather unattractive social decision schemes (SDSs) satisfy strategyproofness on the full domain of preferences. In this paper, we obtain more positive results by investigating strategyproof SDSs on the Condorcet domain, which consists of all preference profiles that admit a Condorcet winner. In more detail, we show that, if the number of voters $n$ is odd, every strategyproof and non-imposing SDS on the Condorcet domain can be represented as a mixture of dictatorial SDSs and the Condorcet rule (which chooses the Condorcet winner with probability $1$). Moreover, we prove that the Condorcet domain is a maximal connected domain that allows for attractive strategyproof SDSs if $n$ is odd as only random dictatorships are strategyproof and non-imposing on any sufficiently connected superset of it. We also derive analogous results for even $n$ by slightly extending the Condorcet domain. Finally, we also characterize the set of group-strategyproof and non-imposing SDSs on the Condorcet domain and its supersets. These characterizations strengthen Gibbard's random dictatorship theorem and establish that the Condorcet domain is essentially a maximal domain that allows for attractive strategyproof SDSs.