On the Manipulability of Voting Systems: application to multi-carrier networks

Internet has evolved from a simple and robust communication system between distant machines at its birth towards an integrated infrastructure that is now used by hundreds of millions of people and a lot of non-profit organizations or commercial enterprises. Many companies use the Internet to make revenues, not only the numerous network operators that are interconnected in the Internet, but also all the service providers that monetize their services on the Internet. In this large-scale, highly competitive environment, it is important to get a fair way to make decisions in this economical ecosystem involving many actors. For that purpose, many studies used the game theory, one of the issues being manipulability of the games in which the actors may cheat. Voting systems represent an interesting alternative that has not yet being studied to our knowledge. They allow competing entities to decide among different options. They can be used in many situations in telecommunications, one example being the case of end-to-end path establishment in multi-carrier networks that we are analyzing in this paper. In order to ensure fairness between the competing entities, a strong requirement is to avoid manipulability by voters. Unfortunately, strong theoretical results showed that, unless using some "degenerated" and a priori nonacceptable voting systems such as the dictatorial ones, any other voting system is susceptible to be manipulated by a single voter! But very little is know about how much a voting system is manipulable.