Adam,
You wrote (Fri.Aug.12):
* OK, in the interest of fairness, here is one winning-votes Condorcet
strategy that is arguably superior to sincerity. This is from Blake
Cretney. It's pretty simple: if you have a sincere tied ranking, it's
better to rank those candidates in some random order than to rank them
equally. So in stead of ranking three candidates tied for fourth,
rank them 4, 5, 6, (in some order) and kick any candidates below
fourth down two slots. There are situations where this strategy can
hurt you, but on average (aggregating over a large number of voters
with similar preferences) it will not.
I don't think you have that quite right. In the "defeat-dropper"
style winning-votes Condorcet methods you refer to, if the voter
sincerely ranks some candidates
equal-bottom, then the voter's best zero-information strategy is to
strictly rank them all at random (i.e. to "random-fill"). In addition
to that, if above-bottom
equal-ranking is allowed, then if the voter has a sufficiently large
gap in his/her sincere ratings he/she should equal-rank above that gap.
Chris Benham
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