Implementation of Jefferson-d'Hondt rule in the formation of a parliamentary committee (Q2247939)

The paper under review considers a parliament consisting of, say \(k\), groups, where one may think of political parties. For a specific task they have to jointly form a committee of size \(q\). This committee is formed via the following voting procedure: Every member of the parliament votes for one out of a set of candidates. The committee then is assembled by the \(q\) candidates who received the most votes. Under certain conditions the outcome of this game can be described by a well-known allocation rule, i.e., the Jefferson-d'Hondt rule. The authors assume that the \(k\) groups act strategically, i.e., the members of the parliament are acting with respect to the global strategy of their group and do not have own preferences. The preferences of the groups are getting as much as possible own committee members in the first and as many as possible votes in the second run. In order to guarantee a deterministic decision a certain tie-breaking rule is assumed. If fractional votes are allowed, then the set of allocations included in the Jefferson-d'Hondt set coincide with the set of Nash equilibria of the corresponding game. If the parliament members are not allowed to split their vote, then Nash equilibria have to be near to the elements of the Jefferson-d'Hondt set in technically precise way.