Convergence to Equilibria in Plurality Voting

Multi-agent decision problems, in which independent agents have to agree on a joint plan of action or allocation of resources, are central to AI. In such situations, agents' individual preferences over available alternatives may vary, and they may try to reconcile these differences by voting. Based on the fact that agents may have incentives to vote strategically and misreport their real preferences, a number of recent papers have explored different possibilities for avoiding or eliminating such manipulations. In contrast to most prior work, this paper focuses on convergence of strategic behavior to a decision from which no voter will want to deviate. We consider scenarios where voters cannot coordinate their actions, but are allowed to change their vote after observing the current outcome. We focus on the Plurality voting rule, and study the conditions under which this iterative game is guaranteed to converge to a Nash equilibrium (i.e., to a decision that is stable against furt...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Reshef Meir, Maria Polukarov, Jeffrey S. Rosenschein, Nicholas R. Jennings
• Keywords: AAAI 2010, Independent Agents, Intelligent Agents, Multi-agent Decision Problems, Plurality Voting Rule