Refined Characterizations of Approval-based Committee Scoring Rules

TL;DR

This paper provides refined characterizations of approval-based committee scoring rules, extending previous models to the standard setting and identifying subclasses like Thiele rules and ballot size weighted approval voting.

Contribution

It extends the characterization of ABC scoring rules to the standard committee election model and introduces a new subclass called ballot size weighted approval voting.

Findings

Characterization of Thiele rules using a consistency axiom.

Introduction of ballot size weighted approval voting as a new subclass.

Derivation of characterizations for multi-winner, proportional, and satisfaction approval voting.

Abstract

In approval-based committee (ABC) elections, the goal is to select a fixed-size subset of the candidates, a so-called committee, based on the voters' approval ballots over the candidates. One of the most popular classes of ABC voting rules are ABC scoring rules, which have recently been characterized by Lackner and Skowron (2021). However, this characterization relies on a model where the output is a ranking of committees instead of a set of winning committees and no full characterization of ABC scoring rules exists in the latter standard setting. We address this issue by characterizing two important subclasses of ABC scoring rules in the standard ABC election model, thereby both extending the result of Lackner and Skowron (2021) to the standard setting and refining it to subclasses. In more detail, by relying on a consistency axiom for variable electorates, we characterize (i) the prominent class of Thiele rules and (ii) a new class of ABC voting rules called ballot size weighted approval voting. Based on these theorems, we also infer characterizations of three well-known ABC voting rules, namely multi-winner approval voting, proportional approval voting, and satisfaction approval voting.