Analysis of Voting Systems

by Mr Girish Varma (School of Technology and Computer Science)

Tuesday 17 May 2011, 17:00 → 18:00 Asia/Kolkata

A-212 (STCS Seminar Room) (Colaba Campus)

This talk will be an introduction to Social Choice Theory, which analyses methods to combine preferences of large number of voters to obtain a result that is "fair". We will define some reasonable conditions for fairness, and prove the Arrows Impossibility theorem which states that no voting system can satisfy all these conditions. References: This theory has been used to analyse an alternative voting scheme in UK, where a recent referendum about it was held (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NS84zuf5_LQ#at=191). Amartya Sen's Nobel Lecture (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1998/sen-lecture.pdf) Proof of Arrows Theorem (http://home.uchicago.edu/~preny/papers/arrow-gibbard-satterthwaite.pdf)