Deliberation via Matching

TL;DR

This paper introduces a pairwise matching deliberation protocol in social choice, achieving a tight distortion bound of 3, matching the power of general deterministic rules with minimal deliberation.

Contribution

It presents a novel matching-based deliberation protocol that closes the gap in distortion bounds for tournament rules, with an analytical proof and a scalable sampling implementation.

Findings

The protocol achieves a tight distortion bound of 3.

Deterministic tournament rules face a lower bound of 3.11 without deliberation.

A sampling-based implementation approximates the deterministic guarantee with low complexity.

Abstract

We study deliberative social choice, where voters engage in small-group discussions to output collective preferences that are then aggregated by a social choice rule. We introduce a simple deliberation-via-matching protocol. In this protocol, for each pair of candidates, we form a maximum matching among voters who disagree on that pair, and have each matched pair deliberate. We then aggregate the resulting individual and deliberative preferences using the weighted uncovered set tournament rule. We show that this protocol has a tight distortion bound of $3$ within the metric distortion framework. In the absence of deliberation, general deterministic social choice rules can achieve this distortion, whereas deterministic tournament rules face a strictly larger lower bound of $3.11$. Our result closes this gap: Pairwise deliberation allows a tournament-based rule to attain distortion $3$. Conceptually, this shows that tournament rules can match the power of general deterministic social choice rules once they are given the minimal added power of pairwise deliberations. We prove this bound via a novel bilinear relaxation of the non-linear program capturing optimal distortion, whose vertices we can explicitly enumerate, leading to an analytic proof. Loosely speaking, our key technical insight is that the distortion objective, as a function of metric distances to any three alternatives, is both supermodular and convex. This characterization therefore provides a new analytical tool for studying the distortion of deliberative protocols, and may be of independent interest. Finally, although our analysis is for the full protocol, we show that this mechanism also admits a lightweight sampling-based implementation, yielding a high-probability approximation to the deterministic guarantee with arbitrary accuracy and low per-voter complexity.