Kernelization complexity of possible winner and coalitional manipulation problems in voting

Abstract

In the Possible winner problem in computational social choice theory, we are given a set of partial preferences and the question is whether a distinguished candidate could be made winner by extending the partial preferences to linear preferences. Previous work has provided, for many common voting rules, fixed parameter tractable algorithms for the Possible winner problem, with number of candidates as the parameter. However, the corresponding kernelization question is still open and in fact, has been mentioned as a key research challenge [10]. In this paper, we settle this open question for many common voting rules.We show that the Possible winner problem for maximin, Copeland, Bucklin, ranked pairs, and a class of scoring rules that includes the Borda voting rule does not admit a polynomial kernel with the number of candidates as the parameter. We show however that the Coalitional manipulation problem which is an important special case of the Possible winner problem does admit a polynomial kernel for maximin, Copeland, ranked pairs, and a class of scoring rules that includes the Borda voting rule, when the number of manipulators is polynomial in the number of candidates. A significant conclusion of our work is that the Possible winner problem is harder than the Coalitional manipulation problem since the Coalitional manipulation problem admits a polynomial kernel whereas the Possible winner problem does not admit a polynomial kernel.