On Sep 3, 2005, at 22:15, Andrew Myers wrote:
I would like to have a statement
about strategic immunity that doesn't rely on people judging the
difficulty of
creating a top cycle.
The best I can offer when it comes to freeing people of judging and
deciding strategies is the following method.
The method consists of two rounds. If the first round produces a
Condorcet winner, the second round is not needed. Otherwise the second
round will be held and also the tie breaking method is used if there is
a top cycle. (Clearly non-winning candidates could be excluded from the
second round but I won't discuss those rules further here.)
In this method those (sincere) voters that do not want to worry about
strategies can forget them in the first round. If someone else created
an artificial cycle or if there was a sincere cycle, those sincere
voters may come back and consider strategies in the second round. Clear
use of strategies in the first round could lead to revenge at the
second round. This fact may to some extent reduce the interest to use
strategies in the first round.
Having two rounds may of course be expensive and troublesome but at
least this method seems to get quite well rid of the small strategic
problems of the Condorcet methods - well, for the first round at least.
Maybe the second round is also in some respects fair since the
strategic options can be seen when the "strategists" have exact
information on how people voted. This availability of information is
also negative in the sense that it is easier to develop complex
strategies when detailed information is available.
BR, Juho
P.S. You mentioned also the possible need to effectively co-ordinated
the insincere votes. I have been interested in learning what such
strategies there are that could take place in real life elections based
either on independent individual decisions (=no effective
co-ordination) or based on some guidance that has been published e.g.
by one party, and if these strategies will elect some candidate that
otherwise would not be even close to victory. Most strategies are quite
theoretical from this point of view, but I haven't been able to
eliminate all. Current voting methods have many strategic problems, so
in theory it is enough for Condorcet not to introduce any
vulnerabilities that are worse than the existing ones. One way of
freeing people from considering strategies is of course also taking
Condorcet methods into use and finding out that they work fine.
P.P.S. Sorry about not providing any clear "immunity statements" as
requested, but maybe these thoughts are at least of some interest :-)
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