375@2026@IJCAI

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#1 The Communication Complexity of Instant-Runoff Voting [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Élie de Panafieu, François Durand, Jérôme Lang

The communication complexity of a voting rule is the worst-case number of bits that n voters must transmit to a central authority under the most efficient elicitation protocol in an election with m candidates. We study the communication complexity of Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV). Conitzer and Sandholm [2005] established an upper bound of O(n (log m)^2), but did not provide a matching lower bound beyond Omega(n log m). We resolve this open problem by raising the lower bound to Omega(n (log m)^2) using the fooling set technique, thereby showing that the communication complexity of IRV is Theta(n (log m)^2). We further show that this complexity drops to Theta(n log m) under the single-peakedness restriction, and that both the IRV-Average variant and Single Transferable Vote (STV), the multiwinner extension of IRV, have the same asymptotic communication complexity as IRV. (Extended version with appendices: https://shs.hal.science/hal-05566718. Short video: https://youtu.be/gTXV3R2DS6o.)

Subject: IJCAI.2026 - Game Theory and Economic Paradigms