Knowledge-Theoretic Aspects of Strategic Voting
Eric Pacuit
University of Maryland
It has long been noted that a voter can sometimes achieve a preferred election outcome by misrepresenting his or her actual preferences. In fact, the classic Gibbard-Sattherthwaite Theorem shows that under very mild conditions, every voting method that is not a dictatorship is susceptible to manipulation by a single voter. One standard response to this important theorem is to note that a voter must possess information about the other voters’ preferences in order for the voter to decide to vote strategically. This seems to limit the “applicability” of the theorem. In this talk, I will survey some recent literature that aims at making this observation precise. This includes models of voting under uncertainty (about other voters’ preferences) and models that take into account how voters may response to poll information.
Eric Pacuit is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park and a member of the Tilburg Institute for Logic and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS) at Tilburg University. After completing his Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center under the supervision of Rohit Parikh, he spent time at both the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation in Amsterdam and the Departments of Philosophy and Computer Science at Stanford University.