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Distributed Agreement in the Arrovian Framework

Authors Kenan Wood , Hammurabi Mendes , Jonad Pulaj

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Kenan Wood
  • Davidson College, NC, USA
Hammurabi Mendes
  • Davidson College, NC, USA
Jonad Pulaj
  • Davidson College, NC, USA

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Kenan Wood, Hammurabi Mendes, and Jonad Pulaj. Distributed Agreement in the Arrovian Framework. In 28th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 324, pp. 32:1-32:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2024.32

Abstract

Preference aggregation is a fundamental problem in voting theory, in which public input rankings of a set of alternatives (called preferences) must be aggregated into a single preference that satisfies certain soundness properties. The celebrated Arrow Impossibility Theorem is equivalent to a distributed task in a synchronous fault-free system that satisfies properties such as respecting unanimous preferences, maintaining independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA), and non-dictatorship, along with consensus since only one preference can be decided.
In this work, we study a weaker distributed task in which crash faults are introduced, IIA is not required, and the consensus property is relaxed to either k-set agreement or ε-approximate agreement using any metric on the set of preferences. In particular, we prove several novel impossibility results for both of these tasks in both synchronous and asynchronous distributed systems. We additionally show that the impossibility for our ε-approximate agreement task using the Kendall tau or Spearman footrule metrics holds under extremely weak assumptions.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Distributed algorithms
  • Mathematics of computing → Discrete mathematics
Keywords
  • Approximate Agreement
  • Set Agreement
  • Preference Aggregation
  • Voting Theory
  • Impossibility

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