What kind of preference profiles are you using for your simulation? Are you defining voter preferences by ordinal ranking? Are the rankings entirely random, or are they built around certain patterns, e.g. issue space, or some other type of 'closeness' of one candidate to another? I'd encourage you to increase the number of candidates when possible. I imagine that this will decrease the probability of convergence. However, it's possible that some non-convergent situations could be more troubling than others. For example, in a ten candidate situation, if it ends up oscillating between two candidates who are relatively similar to one another, there may be some amount of stability in this even though the outcome is non-convergent. I agree with you, though, that we would like to see convergent outcomes given stable preference profiles, and I think that it is interesting to try to figure out which methods do the best job of providing this. I'd ask you for the code, but I'm afraid I don't know anything about computer programming.
my best, James ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
