Weak Strategyproofness in Randomized Social Choice

TL;DR

This paper investigates weak strategyproofness in randomized social choice, proposing systematic design methods for such schemes and analyzing their limitations under strict and weak preferences.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of weak strategyproofness, develops design approaches for weakly strategyproof social decision schemes, and explores their theoretical limitations.

Findings

Existence of weakly strategyproof SDSs that are ex post efficient or Condorcet-consistent for strict preferences.

No SDSs satisfy both properties and weak strategyproofness simultaneously for strict preferences.

Impossibility results prevent the existence of appealing weakly strategyproof SDSs under weak preferences.

Abstract

An important -- but very demanding -- property in collective decision-making is strategyproofness, which requires that voters cannot benefit from submitting insincere preferences. Gibbard (1977) has shown that only rather unattractive rules are strategyproof, even when allowing for randomization. However, Gibbard's theorem is based on a rather strong interpretation of strategyproofness, which deems a manipulation successful if it increases the voter's expected utility for at least one utility function consistent with his ordinal preferences. In this paper, we study weak strategyproofness, which deems a manipulation successful if it increases the voter's expected utility for all utility functions consistent with his ordinal preferences. We show how to systematically design attractive, weakly strategyproof social decision schemes (SDSs) and explore their limitations for both strict and weak preferences. In particular, for strict preferences, we show that there are weakly strategyproof SDSs that are either ex post efficient or Condorcet-consistent, while neither even-chance SDSs nor pairwise SDSs satisfy both properties and weak strategyproofness at the same time. By contrast, for the case of weak preferences, we discuss two sweeping impossibility results that preclude the existence of appealing weakly strategyproof SDSs.