Svetlana
Obraztsova
Nanyang
Technological
University
Traditionally, computational social choice focuses on evaluating voting rules by their resistance to strategic behaviours, and uses computational complexity as a barrier to them. In contrast, recent works (counting from 2010) take another natural approach and analyse voting scenarios from a game-theoretic perspective, viewing strategic parties as players and examining possible stable outcomes of their interaction (i.e., equilibria). The main problem of this approach is multiple unrealistic Nash equilibria. Fortunately, several refinements have been developed that allow to filter out some undesirable Nash Equilibria.
In this talk, I will describe the most recent of these refinements — Trembling Hand Equilibria — and its application to two voting models, based on the Approval and the Plurality voting rules. I will show how Trembling Hand Equilibria help to explain real-world phenomena of the approval voting rule, that were recently discovered in Doodle polls.
Bio: Svetlana Obraztsova currently holds the post of an assistant professor in Nanyang Technological University. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Israeli Centre of Research Excellence (I-CORE), and was affiliated with the Tel-Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Another her postdoctoral appointment was with the CoreLab, National Technical University of Athens, Greece.
Prior to that, she has completed a dual PhD program of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics (St. Petersburg, Russia) and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). Her work was nominated for the Best Paper Award at AAMAS-2011. Dr. Obraztsova has also received the Pragnesh Jay Modi Best student Paper Award at AAMAS-2012.