Obvious Independence of Clones

Abstract

The Independence of Clones (IoC) criterion measures a voting rule's robustness to strategic nomination. Prior literature has established empirically that individuals may still submit costly, distortionary misreports even in strategy-proof (SP) settings, due to failure to recognize the SP property. The intersection of these issues motivates the search for mechanisms that are Obviously Independent of Clones (OIoC): where strategic nomination/exiting of clones obviously has no effect on the outcome. We construct a formal and intuitive definition of a voting rule being OIoC and examine five IoC rules to identify whether they satisfy OIoC.

Extended abstract presented in the 4th International Workshop on Democracy and AI (DemocrAI 2024) at IJCAI-24. Workshop proceedings published ("Artificial Intelligence for Research and Democracy") by Springer Nature. For our follow-up work on this topic, see "From Independence of Clones to Composition Consistency: A Hierarchy of Barriers to Strategic Nomination" by Berker et al. 2025