Paradoxes of Voting

Speaker: Lachlan Dufton, University of Waterloo

Voting is ubiquitous wherever groups of individuals must make collective decisions. These decisions can range from high importance,such as the selection of a government or a country's policies, to the more trivial, such as where to go for dinner. Unfortunately, voting systems are subject to many paradoxes and impossibility results. In fact, every voting system is vulnerable to at least one paradox. In this talk, I will cover some common voting systems and the various paradoxes or problems that affect them. I will also discuss how these problems are handled, particularly as examined in the field of Computational Social Choice.