An Experimental Comparison of Multiwinner Voting Rules on Approval Elections

P. Faliszewski, M. Lackner, K. Sornat, S. Szufa
IJCAI 2023
Abstract
In this paper, we experimentally compare major approval based multiwinner voting rules. To this end, we define a measure of similarity between two equal sized committees subject to a given election. Using synthetic elections coming from several distributions, we analyze how similar are the committees provided by prominent voting rules. Our results can be visualized as maps of voting rules, which provide a counterpoint to a purely axiomatic classification of voting rules. The strength of our proposed method is its independence from preimposed classifications (such as the satisfaction of concrete axioms), and that it indeed offers a much finer distinction than the current state of axiomatic analysis.

Experiments:

Election type Culture Candidates Voters Instances Parameters
Approval PabuLib {100} {100} 1000 None
Approval Euclidean 2D {100} {100} 1000 1D: $r=0.05$; 2D: $r.0.2$
Approval Resampling {100} {100} 1000 None
Approval Party-list {100} {100} 1000 None
Approval Euclidean 1D {100} {100} 1000 1D: $r=0.05$; 2D: $r.0.2$
Approval Disjoint {100} {100} 1000 None