Assessing the Welfare Effects of Strategic Voting

Student: Teplova Daria

Supervisor: Egor Ianovski

Faculty: St.Petersburg School of Economics and Management

Educational Programme: Economics (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2021

Strategic behavior in voting is unavoidable, but the extent to which it is actually detrimental has rarely been studied. In this paper we consider voting from a social welfare perspective, assessing the outcome by Borda (rank-average), Rawlsian (maxmin), and Nash (product) utility before and after an agent manipulates the election in his favor. Our work focuses on scoring rules, and in particular the Borda, k-approval, and geometric families of rules, and measures the cost imposed by manipulation on synthetic and real data.

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