Heuristics and models in approval voting: Results from a real-world study

In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting and, in scenarios such as committee or board elections, employing voting rules that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent submits a ballot consisting of approvals for as many candidates as they wish, and the winners are chosen by tallying up the votes and choosing the top- k candidates receiving the most approvals. In many scenarios, an agent may manipulate the ballot they submit to achieve a better outcome by voting in a way that does not reflect their true preferences. In complex and uncertain situations, agents may use heuristics instead of incurring the additional effort required to compute the manipulation which most favors them. In this paper, we examine voting behavior in single-winner and multi-winner approval voting scenarios with varying degrees of uncertainty using behavioral data obtained from Mechanical Turk. We find that people generally manipulate their votes to obtain a better outcome, but often do not identify the optimal manipulation. There are a number of predictive models of agent behavior in the social choice and psychology literature that are based on cognitively plausible heuristic strategies. We show that existing approaches do not adequately model our real-world data. We propose a novel model that considers the size of the winning set and human cognitive constraints, and demonstrate that this model is more effective at capturing real-world behaviors in multi-winner approval voting scenarios.