Two-Winner Election Using Favorite-Candidate Voting Rule

Abstract

We investigate two-winner election problem seeking to minimize the social cost. We are interested in strategy-proof mechanisms where each voter only reports a single candidate. In our model, candidates and voters are located in Euclidean space and candidates' locations are known to the mechanism. The quality of a mechanism is measured by its distortion, defined as the worst-case ratio between the social cost achieved by the mechanism and the optimal one. We find that the ratio between the maximum and minimum distances among every two candidates plays a vital role in the distortion of mechanisms. When there are three candidates, the problem is solved mainly by previous work. We mainly focus on the problem with at least four candidates. When voters and candidates are embedded in 1-dimensional space, we establish several lower bounds of the distortion. When voters and candidates are embedded in at least 3-dimensional space, we give a tight bound of the distortion.