Researcher profile

Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin

Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

3 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Computing Thiele Rules on Interval Elections and their Generalizations

Approval-based committee voting has received significant attention in the social choice community. Among the studied rules, Thiele rules, and especially Proportional Approval Voting (PAV), stand out for desirable properties such as proportional representation, Pareto optimality, and support monotonicity. Their main drawback is that computing a Thiele outcome is NP-hard in general. A glimpse of hope comes from the fact that Thiele rules are better behaved under structured preferences. On the candidate interval (CI) domain, they are computable in polynomial time via a linear program (LP) that has a totally unimodular constraint matrix. Surprisingly, this approach fails for the related voter interval (VI) domain, and the complexity of the problem has repeatedly been posed as an open question. Our main result resolves this question: although the relevant matrix is not totally unimodular, the ``standard'' LP still admits at least one optimal integral solution, and we provide a fast algorithm for finding it. Our technique naturally extends to the voter-candidate interval (VCI) domain, also known as the 1-dimensional voter-candidate range (1D-VCR) domain, and to the linearly consistent (LC) domain, both of which generalize the candidate and voter interval domains. Although both the VCI and LC domains have been studied in social choice, their relationship was unknown. We show, through connections to graph theory, that LC strictly contains VCI. We also provide an alternative definition of LC that is closer in spirit to VCI and has a natural interpretation in approval elections; this equivalence may be of independent interest. Finally, we study an alternative tree-based generalization of VCI and show that Thiele rules become NP-hard to compute on this domain.

preprint2022arXiv

Approval-Based Apportionment

In the apportionment problem, a fixed number of seats must be distributed among parties in proportion to the number of voters supporting each party. We study a generalization of this setting, in which voters can support multiple parties by casting approval ballots. This approval-based apportionment setting generalizes traditional apportionment and is a natural restriction of approval-based multiwinner elections, where approval ballots range over individual candidates instead of parties. Using techniques from both apportionment and multiwinner elections, we identify rules that generalize the D'Hondt apportionment method and that satisfy strong axioms which are generalizations of properties commonly studied in the apportionment literature. In fact, the rules we discuss provide representation guarantees that are currently out of reach in the general setting of multiwinner elections: First, we show that core-stable committees are guaranteed to exist and can be found in polynomial time. Second, we demonstrate that extended justified representation is compatible with committee monotonicity (also known as house monotonicity).

preprint2021arXiv

Selecting Matchings via Multiwinner Voting: How Structure Defeats a Large Candidate Space

Given a set of agents with approval preferences over each other, we study the task of finding $k$ matchings fairly representing everyone's preferences. We model the problem as an approval-based multiwinner election where the set of candidates consists of all possible matchings and agents' preferences over each other are lifted to preferences over matchings. Due to the exponential number of candidates in such elections, standard algorithms for classical sequential voting rules (such as those proposed by Thiele and Phragmén) are rendered inefficient. We show that the computational tractability of these rules can be regained by exploiting the structure of the approval preferences. Moreover, we establish algorithmic results and axiomatic guarantees that go beyond those obtainable in the general multiwinner setting. Assuming that approvals are symmetric, we show that proportional approval voting (PAV), a well-established but computationally intractable voting rule, becomes polynomial-time computable, and its sequential variant (seq-PAV), which does not provide any proportionality guarantees in general, fulfills a rather strong guarantee known as extended justified representation. Some of our positive computational results extend to other types of compactly representable elections with an exponential candidate space.