Tutorial on Voting Theory at AAAI-2010


Voting theory is the study of methods for conducting elections. It has attracted a lot of interest from AI researchers in recent years: there are important applications of voting theory in AI (for example, in multiagent systems) and the tools and techniques of AI have proven useful for the study of voting methods (for example, complexity theory, knowledge representation, and automated reasoning). This tutorial will provide an introduction to the theory of voting for AI researchers. We will present the most important voting procedures and cover some of the classical theorems in the field. We will also see examples for recent work in computational social choice, which brings together ideas from social choice theory (including voting theory) and computer science (including AI). No specific background knowledge will be assumed; the tutorial will be accessible to anybody working in AI.

Interest in the AI community in problems of voting and social choice has grown rapidly in recent years (e.g., there are at least a dozen papers on voting at this edition of AAAI). Nevertheless, most AI researchers are probably not familiar with the basics of the field, which has had a long and distinguished history in mathematical economics and political science. The goals of this tutorial are twofold:

The tutorial will consist of three parts: