Hello James and All,
On Mar 26, 2005, at 14:05, James Green-Armytage wrote:
Yes, but you've not yet understood the virtue of cardinal-weighted
pairwise and approval-weighted pairwise. I request that you read my
cardinal pairwise paper, as most of the arguments used therein apply to
AWP as well.
http://fc.antioch.edu/~james_green-armytage/cwp13.htm
No Condorcet method can escape the possibility of the burying strategy,
but CWP and AWP make it so that you can't change the result from a sincere
CW to someone who is very *different* from the sincere CW (except by large
cycle strategies that are probably to complex to be realistic).
I think there is some confusion here. My intention was not to criticize the cardinal pairwise or other methods but just to comment on the (voting method independent) evaluation criteria that were used when studying the voting examples. My statement was thus that if sincere votes would be X but real votes are Y, it is very difficult (maybe not possible in practice) to construct a voting method that would take X into account when making decisions. This is because only Y is known and it is too difficult to guess what X was (or to identify which individual votes are strategic in Y). We can only use some generic means (=no reference to the actual sincere votes X) when trying to eliminate strategies. Agreed?
Concerning the rest of your mail I think your analysis of this example is good, and related voting methods that add new information to basic ranking are a very fruitful area of study. Since I commented the evaluation criteria only, my intention was not to say that K/Kerry should not win this election. I only said that being a sincere Condorcet winner is not a good argument to favour K. I agree that the ratings give additional information that can be used to determine how the cycles should be solved, and in this case evidence supports Kerry quite well. I believe I'm quite in line with you here.
If the reward-strength/probability of a given strategy obviouslyThe best voting methods or voting organizers can do in this situation is to try to discourage strategic voting.
outweighs the risk strength/probability, then we should assume that voters
will tend to use the strategy. Perhaps they won't, but we should err on
the side of caution, especially where flagrant incursions are concerned.
Anything else would be naive and dangerous.
I agree. But in addition to "risk strength/probability" we should cover also things like difficulty to understand/apply, difficulty to agree on the strategy etc. Also the "level of distortion" (a strategy may lead e.g. to election of the second best or the worst candidate) should be taken into account when evaluating the need to defend against different strategies.
Happy birthday to you. Best Regards, Juho
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