On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 09:31:33PM +0200, Jobst Heitzig wrote: > Can anybody cite a study showing cycles would be rare in "real" > elections with many candidates and truely ranked ballots (not 90% bullet > votes because of lazy voters)? This claim comes up again and again and > it seems to me that there is no evidence for this. At least my > simulations showed that when there is a set of closely tied candidates > and individual preferences are at least mildly independent then cycles > occur more and *more* frequently as the number of these candidates grows...
This isn't a formal study, but experience with CIVS suggests cycles are usually not a problem. See, for example, the following reasonably large public elections chosen pretty much at random from past history: http://www5.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/andru/civs/results?id=E_7f2829a7cfa6c857 http://www5.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/andru/civs/results?id=E_2ecaeb874ed56bac http://www5.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/andru/civs/results?id=E_c27be1d900679a9c http://www5.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/andru/civs/results?id=E_a579b65f910f1560 http://www5.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/andru/civs/results?id=E_6fdd6b4b65251159 http://www5.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/andru/civs/results?id=E_8524af2f699df817 Of these, only the last contains any cycles of note. For the most part, the ranked ballots are pretty good at achieving a complete ordering of the alternatives that does not depend on the completion method chosen. -- Andrew ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
