Approval-Based Committee Voting under Incomplete Information

Abstract

We investigate approval-based committee voting with incomplete information about the approval preferences of voters. We consider several models of incompleteness where each voter partitions the set of candidates into approved, disapproved, and unknown candidates, possibly with ordinal preference constraints among candidates in the latter category. This captures scenarios where voters have not evaluated all candidates and/or it is unknown where voters draw the threshold between approved and disapproved candidates. We study the complexity of some fundamental computational problems for a number of classic approval-based committee voting rules including Proportional Approval Voting and Chamberlin-Courant. These problems include that of determining whether a given set of candidates is a possible or necessary winning committee and whether it forms a committee that possibly or necessarily satisfies representation axioms. We also consider the problem whether a given candidate is possibly or necessarily a member of the winning committee.