Thanks to all who have answered on and off list. Any further responses gratefully received, though!
I'm now rather concerned about violation of the participation criterion, and would be delighted to hear about ranked methods that don't violate it. I suspect though that single winner cases are likely to be a degenerate case of the general solution and so where things might work in general, they won't here. Which is a shame, since the situation I'm trying to come up with the best possible solution for is necessarily a single-winner case. There may (fingers crossed) be an opportunity for some analysis with data from real elections (see the last two tables on http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~galletly/results.pdf for the elections I really want to analyse) -- I've been accused of using contrived examples to make points, and I suspect these elections of giving real-life examples of problems. If it does get to the point of my getting the raw data, I'll be very happy to test any method around to see what results would be obtained in these two cases. Diana. ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
