yesterday I mentioned regret minimization as a voting strategy when nothing is known about winnability, but when one has utility ratings. Regret is measured by the utility difference between the person who won & the best person whom you could have made to win had you voted for him. As I said, in Approval, when nothing is known about winnability or tie probabilities, one minimizes possible regret by voting down to the average of the best & the worst. Say we designate the worst as 0 & the best ass 100. If you vote down to 50, then, at worst, someone with 0 utilitly will win, and you'll find out that you could have made someone with 49 win. Or someone with 50 will win and you'll find that you could have made your favorite, with 100, win had you not voted for the 50 guy. Obviously, if you make your cutoff point higher or lower, you increase the possible regret. But when you have utility ratings, but no winnability knowledge, then if I were a result optimizer, I'd instead vote to maximize utility expectation by averaging _all_ the utilities, not just the best & worst, & voting down to that average. Mike
