Dear Kevin! You replied to Russ: > I would also like to hear again the benefit *inherent* to combining ordinal > and cardinal information. It seems to me that you, Jobst, and James all have > different purposes in doing this.
I have to correct you: I don't think at all that we should base a method ordinal information since I don't believe there can be sincere cardinal information. You probably refer to approval information as cardinal information, but that is only your interpretation of approval, not mine. I wonder what should be cardinal about a yes-no question... Anyway, here's why I think a (sincere) method should make use of all forms of preference information a voter *can* give in a sincere way (pairwise preferences, favourite, approval): In my opinion, the main benefit of combining different kinds of preference information is that it probably will give a more reliable result than when we just arbitrarily focus on some specific kind of information and ignore the others. As I understand James, his main point is strategic considerations, and I welcome any evidence that a particular approval-aware method has good anti-strategical properties. Russ' main point seems to be that a publicly proposed method should be much more simple than most of the defeat-strength-based methods. I also welcome if a method is very simple, like DFC or DMC/RAV are. You also wrote: > Of course RAV just substitutes an approval measure for WV or Margins. > It's unchanged, that increasing the strength of one candidate's wins can > cancel another candidate's wins. That is also a strange interpretation. Of course, as some of us including me realized or proved, DMC/RAV is *logically equivalent* to a number of well-known defeat dropping methods when defeat strength is defined in a certain way. But defeat strengths are not at all the idea of neither RAV or DMC, and those methods don't "cancel" any wins. Yours, Jobst ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
