Identifying Imperfect Clones in Elections

A perfect clone in an ordinal election (i.e., an election where the voters rank the candidates in a strict linear order) is a set of candidates that each voter ranks consecutively. We consider different relaxations of this notion: *independent* or *subelection clones* are sets of candidates that only some of the voters recognize as a perfect clone, whereas *approximate clones* are sets of candidates such that every voter ranks their members close to each other, but not necessarily consecutively. We establish the complexity of identifying such imperfect clones, and of partitioning the candidates into families of imperfect clones. We also study the parameterized complexity of these problems with respect to a set of natural parameters such as the number of voters, the size or the number of imperfect clones we are searching for, or their level of imperfection.

Authors

• Piotr Faliszewski AGH University of Krakow
• Łukasz Janeczko AGH University of Krakow
• Grzegorz Lisowski University of Groningen
• Kristýna Pekárková AGH University of Krakow
• Ildikó Schlotter ELTE Centre for Economic and Regional Studies

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