#IJCAI2022 distinguished paper – Plurality veto: A simple voting rule achieving optimal metric distortion

What was your answer the last time your spouse or partner asked how much you like them? Whatever your answer was, it probably did not include a unit of measurement. For most people, it is cognitively hard to tell how much they like somebody or something with objectivity. This has an invisible but crucial effect on how we humans make group decisions. Namely, due to the difficulty of quantifying strengths of preferences, as well as the potential that individuals might deliberately misrepresent strengths to manipulate outcomes, most voting systems (or group decision protocols) only elicit a ranking of alternatives from voters.