Identifying Imperfect Clones in Elections

Speaker(s)

Kristýna Pekárková

Affiliation

University of Warsaw

Language of the talk

English

Date

Dec. 4, 2025, noon

Information about the event

seminarium zdalne

Seminar

Seminar Algorithmic Economics

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In elections, perfect clones are groups of candidates that appear indistinguishable from the voters’ perspective – either they are ranked consecutively by every voter (in ordinal elections), or they are approved by exactly the same voters (in approval elections). However, such perfect similarity is too strict and rarely observed in real data. In this talk, we will discuss the concept of imperfect clones for both ordinal and approval elections. For each setting, we propose several relaxations of perfect clones, and analyze the (parameterized) complexity of two fundamental tasks: detecting the presence of imperfect clones in a given election, and partitioning the entire candidate set into families of imperfect clones.

This is a joint work with Théo Delemazure, Piotr Faliszewski, Łukasz Janeczko, Dušan Knop, Grzegorz Lisowski, Jan Pokorný, Šimon Schierreich, and Ildi Schlotter.

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