Committee selection with intraclass and interclass synergies

Abstract

Voting is almost never done in void, as usually there are some relations between the alternatives on which the voters vote on. These relations shall be taken into consideration when selecting a winning committee of some given multiwinner election. As taking into account all possible relations between the alternatives is generally computationally intractable, in this paper we consider classes of alternatives; intuitively, the number of classes is significantly smaller than the number of alternatives, and thus there is some hope in reaching computational tractability. We model both intraclass relations and interclass relations by functions, which we refer to as synergy functions, and study the computational complexity of identifying the best committee, taking into account those synergy functions. Our model accommodates both positive and negative relations between alternatives; further, our efficient algorithms can also deal with a rich class of diversity wishes, which we show how to model using synergy functions.