Choosing Collectively Optimal Sets of Alternatives Based on the Condorcet Criterion

E. Elkind, J. Lang, A. Saffidine
IJCAI 2011
Abstract
In elections, an alternative is said to be a Condorcet winner if it is preferred to any other alternative by a majority of voters. While this is a very attractive solution concept, many elections do not have a Condorcet winner. In this paper, we propose a setvalued relaxation of this concept, which we call a Condorcet winning set: such sets consist of alternatives that collectively dominate any other alternative. We also consider a more general version of this concept, where instead of domination by a majority of voters we require domination by a given fraction theta of voters; we refer to this concept as theta-winning set. We explore social choice-theoretic and algorithmic aspects of these solution concepts, both theoretically and empirically.

Remarks: There is a journal version: Edith Elkind, Jérôme Lang, Abdallah Saffidine, Condorcet winning sets. Soc. Choice Welf. 44(3): 493-517 (2015)

Experiments:

Election type Culture Candidates Voters Instances Parameters
Ordinal Impartial Culture {15, 50, 100} {10, 11, 20, 21, 100, 101} None None
Ordinal Impartial Culture {30} [1-100] None None
Ordinal Impartial Culture {20} {5, 8, 20, 500, 2000} None None