Lawyers, Guns and Money – the Bribery Problem and U.K. Bribery Act 2010

Swap Bribery

In voting theory, bribery is a form of manipulative behavior in which an external actor (the briber) offers to pay the voters to change their votes in order to get her preferred candidate elected. We investigate a model of bribery where the price of each vote depends on the amount of change that the voter is asked to implement. Specifically, in our model the briber can change a voter’s preferen...

Guns, Lawyers, and Money: Economic Consequences of Costly Conflict

Con‡ict and appropriation are costly activities that are economically signi…cant, yet the assumption of perfect and costless enforcement of property rights in much of economic research has limited their systematic study. Con‡ict follows directly from the methodological principle of self-interest and taking it into account in modeling leads to very di¤erent …ndings than in its absence: in straig...

Nonuniform bribery

We study the concept of bribery in the situation where voters are willing to change their votes as we ask them, but where their prices depend on the nature of the change we request. Our model is an extension of the one of Faliszewski et al. [FHH06], where each voter has a single price for any change we may ask for. We show polynomial-time algorithms for our version of bribery for a broad range ...

Thinking About Bribery

Frugal Bribery in Voting

Bribery in elections is an important problem in computational social choice theory. We introduce and study two important special cases of the classical $BRIBERY problem, namely, FRUGAL-BRIBERY and FRUGAL-$BRIBERY where the briber is frugal in nature. By this, we mean that the briber is only able to influence voters who benefit from the suggestion of the briber. More formally, a voter is vulnera...