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Six Candidates Suffice to Win a Voter Majority

Adrian Vetta ( McGill University )

Time and place: Seminar Room 051 (Wolfson Building), Fri 17 Oct, 12pm - 12.45pm

Abstract: Given an election of n voters with preference lists over m candidates, Elkind, Lang, and Saffidine (2011) defined a Condorcet winning set to be a collection of candidates that the majority of voters prefer over any individual candidate. Condorcet winning sets of cardinality one (a Condorcet winner) or cardinality two need not exist. We prove however that a Condorcet winning set of cardinality at most six exists in any election.
(Joint work with M. Charikar, P. Ramakrishnan, A. Lassota and K. Wang)