Modeling Single-Peakedness for Votes with Ties

Abstract

Single-peakedness is one of the most important and well-known domain restrictions on preferences. The computational study of single-peaked electorates has largely been restricted to elections with tie-free votes, and recent work that studies the computational complexity of manipulative attacks for single-peaked elections for votes with ties has been restricted to nonstandard models of single-peaked preferences for top orders. We study the computational complexity of manipulation for votes with ties for the standard model of single-peaked preferences and for single-plateaued preferences. We show that these models avoid the anomalous complexity behavior exhibited by the other models. We also state a surprising result on the relation between the societal axis and the complexity of manipulation for single-peaked preferences.