Heuristic and exact solutions to the inverse power index problem for small voting bodies (Q744673)

The paper contributes to the literature on power indices and concerns heuristic and exact solutions to the inverse problem for the Penrose-Banzhaf index. It consists of six sections and two appendices. After presenting in Section 1 the state-of-the-art and quoting main results related to the problem in question, in Section 2 the authors recall binary voting systems and their properties. In particular, the concepts of simple game, complete simple game, and weighted voting game are recapitulated. In Section 3, the inverse power index problem is stated. The problem consists in ``finding a voting system which induces a power distribution as close as possible to a desired one''. The authors recall the absolute and normalized Penrose-Banzhaf indices, and the result of \textit{N. Alon} and \textit{P. H. Edelman} [Soc. Choice Welfare 34, No. 3, 371--377 (2010; Zbl 1201.91045)] on how well the inverse problem can be solved for the normalized Penrose-Banzhaf index in the worst case. This section is terminated by a discussion of the worst case bounds. The design of the comparative investigation and the computational results are given in Sections 4 and 5, respectively. Conclusions are presented in Section 6. The appendices contain some technical details.