No abstract

We focus on the following natural question: is it possible to influence the outcome of a voting process through the strategic provision of information to voters who update their beliefs rationally? We investigate whether it is computationally tractable to design a signaling scheme maximizing the probability with which the sender's preferred candidate is elected. We resort to the model recently introduced by Arieli and Babichenko (2019) (i.e., without inter-agent externalities), and focus on, as illustrative examples, k-voting rules and plurality voting. There is a sharp contrast between the case in which private signals are allowed and the more restrictive setting in which only public signals are allowed. In the former, we show that an optimal signaling scheme can be computed efficiently both under a k-voting rule and plurality voting. In establishing these results, we provide two contributions applicable to general settings beyond voting. Specifically, we extend a well-known result by Dughmi and Xu (2017) to more general settings and prove that, when the sender's utility function is anonymous, computing an optimal signaling scheme is fixed-parameter tractable in the number of receivers' actions. In the public signaling case, we show that the sender's optimal expected return cannot be approximated to within any factor under a k-voting rule. This negative result easily extends to plurality voting and problems where utility functions are anonymous.

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We study the problem of finding Stackelberg equilibria in games with a massive number of players. So far, the only known game instances in which the problem is solved in polynomial time are some particular congestion games. However, a complete characterization of hard and easy instances is still lacking. In this paper, we extend the state of the art along two main directions. First, we focus on games where players' actions are made of multiple resources, and we prove that the problem is NPhard and not in Poly-APX unless P = NP, even in the basic case in which players are symmetric, their actions are made of only two resources, and the cost functions are monotonic. Second, we focus on games with singleton actions where the players are partitioned into classes, depending on which actions they have available. In this case, we provide a dynamic programming algorithm that finds an equilibrium in polynomial time, when the number of classes is fixed and the leader plays pure strategies. Moreover, we prove that, if we allow for leader's mixed strategies, then the problem becomes NPhard even with only four classes and monotonic costs. Finally, for both settings, we provide mixedinteger linear programming formulations, and we experimentally evaluate their scalability on both random game instances and worst-case instances based on our hardness reductions.

We focus on the scenario in which messages pro and/or against one or multiple candidates are spread through a social network in order to affect the votes of the receivers. Several results are known in the literature when the manipulator can make seeding by buying influencers. In this paper, instead, we assume the set of influencers and their messages to be given, and we ask whether a manipulator (e.g., the platform) can alter the outcome of the election by adding or removing edges in the social network. We study a wide range of cases distinguishing for the number of candidates or for the kind of messages spread over the network. We provide a positive result, showing that, except for trivial cases, manipulation is not affordable, the optimization problem being hard even if the manipulator has an unlimited budget (i.e., he can add or remove as many edges as desired). Furthermore, we prove that our hardness results still hold in a reoptimization variant, where the manipulator already knows an optimal solution to the problem and needs to compute a new solution once a local modification occurs (e.g., in bandit scenarios where estimations related to random variables change over time).