Structural Control in Weighted Voting Games

Abstract

Abstract Inspired by the study of control scenarios in elections and complementing manipulation and bribery settings in cooperative games with transferable utility, we introduce the notion of structural control in weighted voting games. We model two types of influence, adding players to and deleting players from a game, with goals such as increasing a given player’s Shapley–Shubik or probabilistic Penrose–Banzhaf index in relation to the original game. We study the computational complexity of the problems of whether such structural changes can achieve the desired effect.