Strategic considerations in the design of committees

We study settings in which a central authority must appoint a number of committees, where each committee is tasked with making a specific decision via a given voting rule. Each voter has their own individual preferences, and the center desires the decisions to be made in a certain way. The overall problem is whether the center can design the committees so that if the committee members then vote according to their preferences, the decisions will be made according to the desires of the center. After motivating and formally defining this problem, we investigate cases where this problem can be solved in polynomial time, and highlight cases where the problem is intractable. We consider a range of possible voting rules. We conclude with some possible extensions to the model and future work. Copyright © 2013, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.