Eliciting a Suitable Voting Rule via Examples
Olivier Cailloux, Ulle Endriss

Abstract:
We address the problem of specifying a voting rule by means 
of a series of examples. Each example consists of the answer 
to a simple question: how should the rule rank two alternatives, 
given the positions at which each voter ranks the two alternatives? 
To be able to formalise this elicitation problem, we develop a 
novel variant of classical social choice theory in terms of 
associations of alternatives with vectors of ranks rather than the 
common associations of voters with preference orders. We then 
define and study a class of voting rules suited for elicitation using 
such answers. Finally, we propose and experimentally evaluate 
several elicitation strategies for arriving at a good approximation 
of the target rule with a reasonable number of queries.