CUNY SEMINAR IN LOGIC, PROBABILITY, AND GAMES
Knowledge-Theoretic Aspects of Strategic Voting
Eric Pacuit (University of Maryland)
4:15 – 6:15 PM, Friday, May 9, 2014
Room 3309, CUNY GC
Abstract. It has long been noted that a voter can sometimes achieve a preferred election outcome by misrepresenting his or her actual preferences. In fact, the classic Gibbard-Sattherthwaite Theorem shows that under very mild conditions, every voting method that is not a dictatorship is susceptible to manipulation by a single voter. One standard response to this important theorem is to note that a voter must possess information about the other voters’ preferences in order for the voter to decide to vote strategically. This seems to limit the “applicability” of the theorem. In this talk, I will survey some recent literature that aims at making this observation precise. This includes models of voting under uncertainty (about other voters’ preferences) and models that take into account how voters may response to poll information.
Formal Philosophy 