Strategyproof Voting under Correlated Beliefs

In voting theory, when voters have ranked preferences over candidates, the cele-brated Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem essentially rules out the existence of reasonable strategyproof methods for picking a winner. What if we weaken strate-gyproofness to only hold for Bayesian voters with beliefs over others’ preferences? When voters believe other participants’ rankings are drawn independently from a fixed distribution, the impossibility persists. However, it is quite reasonable for a voter to believe that other votes are correlated, either to each other or to their own ranking. We consider such beliefs induced by classic probabilistic models in social choice such as the Mallows , Placket-Luce , and Thurstone-Mosteller models. We single out the plurality rule (choosing the candidate ranked first most often) as a particularly promising choice as it is strategyproof for a large class of beliefs containing the specific ones we introduce. Further, we show that plurality is unique among positional scoring rules in having this property: no other scoring rule is strategyproof for beliefs induced by the Mallows model when there are a sufficient number of voters. Finally, we give examples of prominent non-scoring voting rules failing to be strategyproof on beliefs in this class, further bolstering the case for plurality.