Six Candidates Suffice to Win a Voter Majority

Speaker:
Vivek Karunakaran
Organiser:
Umang Bhaskar
Date:
Wednesday, 23 Jul 2025, 14:00 to 15:30
Venue:
A-201 (STCS Seminar Room)
Category:
Abstract

A cornerstone of social choice theory is Condorcet's paradox which says that in an election where n voters rank m candidates it is possible that, no matter which candidate is declared the winner, a majority of voters would have preferred an alternative candidate. Instead, can we always choose a small committee of winning candidates that is preferred to any alternative candidate by a majority of voters?

Elkind, Lang, and Saffidine raised this question and called such a committee a Condorcet winning set. They showed that winning sets of size 2 may not exist, but sets of size logarithmic in the number of candidates always do. In this work, the authors show that Condorcet winning sets of size 6 always exist, regardless of the number of candidates or the number of voters. The proof uses the probabilistic method and the minimax theorem, inspired by recent work on approximately stable committee selection.