Controlling weighted voting games by deleting or adding players with or without changing the quota

Abstract

Weighted voting games are a well-studied class of succinct simple games that can be used to model collective decision-making in, e.g., legislative bodies such as parliaments and shareholder voting. Power indices [1,2,3,4] are used to measure the influence of players in weighted voting games. In such games, it has been studied how a distinguished player’s power can be changed, e.g., by merging or splitting players (the latter is a.k.a. false-name manipulation) [5, 6], by changing the quota [7], or via structural control by adding or deleting players [8]. We continue the work on the structural control initiated by Rey and Rothe [8] by solving some of their open problems. In addition, we also modify their model to a more realistic setting in which the quota is indirectly changed during the addition or deletion of players (in a different sense than that of Zuckerman et al. [7] who manipulate the quota directly without changing the set of players), and we study the corresponding problems in terms of their computational complexity.