Control by Deleting Players from Weighted Voting Games Is NP^PP-Complete for the Penrose-Banzhaf Power Index

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Kaczmarek, Joanna, Rothe, Jörg
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866908494771257344
author Kaczmarek, Joanna
Rothe, Jörg
author_facet Kaczmarek, Joanna
Rothe, Jörg
contents Weighted voting games are a popular class of coalitional games that are widely used to model real-life situations of decision-making. They can be applied, for instance, to analyze legislative processes in parliaments or voting in corporate structures. Various ways of tampering with these games have been studied, among them merging or splitting players, fiddling with the quota, and controlling weighted voting games by adding or deleting players. While the complexity of control by adding players to such games so as to change or maintain a given player's power has been recently settled, the complexity of control by deleting players from such games (with the same goals) remained open. We show that when the players' power is measured by the probabilistic Penrose-Banzhaf index, some of these problems are complete for NP^PP -- the class of problems solvable by NP machines equipped with a PP ("probabilistic polynomial time") oracle. Our results optimally improve the currently known lower bounds of hardness for much smaller complexity classes, thus providing protection against SAT-solving techniques in practical applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_13868
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Control by Deleting Players from Weighted Voting Games Is NP^PP-Complete for the Penrose-Banzhaf Power Index
Kaczmarek, Joanna
Rothe, Jörg
Computer Science and Game Theory
Weighted voting games are a popular class of coalitional games that are widely used to model real-life situations of decision-making. They can be applied, for instance, to analyze legislative processes in parliaments or voting in corporate structures. Various ways of tampering with these games have been studied, among them merging or splitting players, fiddling with the quota, and controlling weighted voting games by adding or deleting players. While the complexity of control by adding players to such games so as to change or maintain a given player's power has been recently settled, the complexity of control by deleting players from such games (with the same goals) remained open. We show that when the players' power is measured by the probabilistic Penrose-Banzhaf index, some of these problems are complete for NP^PP -- the class of problems solvable by NP machines equipped with a PP ("probabilistic polynomial time") oracle. Our results optimally improve the currently known lower bounds of hardness for much smaller complexity classes, thus providing protection against SAT-solving techniques in practical applications.
title Control by Deleting Players from Weighted Voting Games Is NP^PP-Complete for the Penrose-Banzhaf Power Index
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13868