Multi-Winner Voting Games in TU and NTU: When is the Core Always Non-Empty?

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified cooperative-game framework to analyze the stability of multi-winner approval voting rules under utility transfer models, exploring core existence and computation.

Contribution

It formalizes multi-winner voting as a cooperative game with transferable and non-transferable utilities, studying core properties across several voting rules.

Findings

NTU-core aligns with prior core-stable committees for PAV/approval utility.

TU-core for multi-winner voting is introduced and analyzed.

The paper provides insights into core existence and computational aspects for four voting rules.

Abstract

Multi-winner approval voting selects a size-$k$ committee that aggregates voters' approval preferences over a set of alternatives. A central question is coalitional stability: No coalition should be able to pick a committee -- of size at most its proportional share -- under which every coalition member has strictly more approved alternatives. This notion, introduced by Aziz et al. (2017) as core-stable committees, is naturally interpreted as a core notion with non-transferable utility. We introduce multi-winner voting games, a cooperative-game framework that unifies prior work and supports a systematic study of two utility-transfer models across different voting rules. Players are voters. Each coalition has a proportional seat cap and may only propose admissible committees up to that size. Fixing a multi-winner rule, each admissible committee induces a utility vector for the members of the coalition. In the transferable utility (TU) model, a coalition may redistribute the total utility of an admissible committee among its members. In the non-transferable utility (NTU) model, a coalition may only use utility vectors that are realized directly by some admissible committee. The core consists of utility vectors feasible for the grand coalition that are not blocked by any coalition. A coalition is blocking if it can propose an admissible committee that makes all its members strictly better off, directly in NTU and after redistribution in TU. When instantiated with the standard PAV/approval utility, the NTU-core is equivalent to the core-stable committee concept studied in prior work. To our knowledge, the TU-core for multi-winner voting has not been previously studied. We analyze core existence and computation for four prominent rules: Approval Voting (AV), Satisfaction Approval Voting (SAV), Chamberlin--Courant (CC), Proportional Approval Voting (PAV).