Nonuniform Bribery

Abstract: 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 of voting protocols, including plurality, veto, approval, and utility based voting. In addition to our polynomial-time algorithms we provide NP-completeness results for a couple of our nonuniform bribery problems for weighted voters, and a couple of approximation algorithms for NP-complete bribery problems defined in FHH06.