Bi-Criteria Metric Distortion

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Banihashem, Kiarash, Chakraborty, Diptarka, Jahan, Shayan Chashm, Gholami, Iman, Hajiaghayi, MohammadTaghi, Mahdavi, Mohammad, Springer, Max
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Banihashem, Kiarash
Chakraborty, Diptarka
Jahan, Shayan Chashm
Gholami, Iman
Hajiaghayi, MohammadTaghi
Mahdavi, Mohammad
Springer, Max
author_facet Banihashem, Kiarash
Chakraborty, Diptarka
Jahan, Shayan Chashm
Gholami, Iman
Hajiaghayi, MohammadTaghi
Mahdavi, Mohammad
Springer, Max
contents Selecting representatives based on voters' preferences is a fundamental problem in social choice theory. While cardinal utility functions offer a detailed representation of preferences, ordinal rankings are often the only available information due to their simplicity and practical constraints. The metric distortion framework addresses this issue by modeling voters and candidates as points in a metric space, with distortion quantifying the efficiency loss from relying solely on ordinal rankings. Existing works define the cost of a voter with respect to a candidate as their distance and set the overall cost as either the sum (utilitarian) or maximum (egalitarian) of these costs across all voters. They show that deterministic algorithms achieve a best-possible distortion of 3 for any metric when considering a single candidate. This paper explores whether one can obtain a better approximation compared to an optimal candidate by relying on a committee of $k$ candidates ($k \ge 1$), where the cost of a voter is defined as its distance to the closest candidate in the committee. We answer this affirmatively in the case of line metrics, demonstrating that with $O(1)$ candidates, it is possible to achieve optimal cost. Our results extend to both utilitarian and egalitarian objectives, providing new upper bounds for the problem. We complement our results with lower bounds for both the line and 2-D Euclidean metrics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_10671
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bi-Criteria Metric Distortion
Banihashem, Kiarash
Chakraborty, Diptarka
Jahan, Shayan Chashm
Gholami, Iman
Hajiaghayi, MohammadTaghi
Mahdavi, Mohammad
Springer, Max
Computer Science and Game Theory
Data Structures and Algorithms
Selecting representatives based on voters' preferences is a fundamental problem in social choice theory. While cardinal utility functions offer a detailed representation of preferences, ordinal rankings are often the only available information due to their simplicity and practical constraints. The metric distortion framework addresses this issue by modeling voters and candidates as points in a metric space, with distortion quantifying the efficiency loss from relying solely on ordinal rankings. Existing works define the cost of a voter with respect to a candidate as their distance and set the overall cost as either the sum (utilitarian) or maximum (egalitarian) of these costs across all voters. They show that deterministic algorithms achieve a best-possible distortion of 3 for any metric when considering a single candidate. This paper explores whether one can obtain a better approximation compared to an optimal candidate by relying on a committee of $k$ candidates ($k \ge 1$), where the cost of a voter is defined as its distance to the closest candidate in the committee. We answer this affirmatively in the case of line metrics, demonstrating that with $O(1)$ candidates, it is possible to achieve optimal cost. Our results extend to both utilitarian and egalitarian objectives, providing new upper bounds for the problem. We complement our results with lower bounds for both the line and 2-D Euclidean metrics.
title Bi-Criteria Metric Distortion
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10671