Controlling Candidate-Sequential Elections

All previous work on “candidate-control” manipulation of elections has been in the model of full-information, simultaneous voting. This is a problem, since in quite a few real-world settings—from TV singing/dancing talent shows to university faculty-hiring processes—candidates are introduced, and appraised by the voters, in sequence. We provide a natural model for sequential candidate evaluation, a framework for evaluating the computational complexity of controlling the outcome within that framework, and some initial results on the range such complexity can take on. We hope our work will lead to further examination of temporally involved candidate control. 1 Motivating Example In an author’s school, faculty hiring happens basically as follows. On some Mondays, a candidate visits, gives a talk, and meets with faculty members. Then each of the department’s rank-and-file faculty members mails to a staff member his or her ranking of all the candidates so far, namely, by inse...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Edith Hemaspaandra, Lane A. Hemaspaandra, Jörg Rothe
• Keywords: Computational Complexity, CORR 2012, Education, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, Heinrich Heine