On the Fixed-Parameter Tractability of Composition-Consistent Tournament Solutions

F. Brandt, M. Brill, H. Seedig
IJCAI 2011
Abstract
Tournament solutions, i.e., functions that associate with each complete and asymmetric relation on a set of alternatives a non-empty subset of the alternatives, play an important role within social choice theory and the mathematical social sciences at large. Laffond et al. have shown that various tournament solutions satisfy composition-consistency, a structural invariance property based on the similarity of alternatives. We define the decomposition degree of a tournament as a parameter that reflects its decomposability and show that computing any composition-consistent tournament solution is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to the decomposition degree. Furthermore, we experimentally investigate the decomposition degree of two natural distributions of tournaments and its impact on the running time of computing the tournament equilibrium set.

Remarks: The authors consider tournaments, but use preference profiles to generate them

Experiments:

Election type Culture Candidates Voters Instances Parameters
Ordinal Euclidean 2D {10, 50, 100, 150, 200} [5-2000] 30 Uniform 2D ($[0,1]^2$)
Ordinal Mallows {10, 50, 100, 150, 200} [5-2000] 30 Condorcet noise model with $p = 0.55$
Ordinal Mallows {30} [1-1000] 30 Condorcet noise model with $p = 0.55$