Several months ago a posting of mine noted and briefly critiqued this book. For brevity, I called it 'The Italian Job' (IJ). IJ's approaches to taxonomy of electoral system are formalistic and unwieldy, but not really systematic - a real disappointment, given the book's professional math society sponsorship. IJ's agreeably thorough discussion of apportionment methods aptly treats them as solutions to an 'optimal' allocation problem, with different methods corresponding to different criteria of optimality. (However, one would expect optimality criteria to be related to and even derived from notions of 'utility'. Maybe I had a case of dyslexia, but I couldn't find any such relationship mentioned, let alone exploited.) Joe Weinstein Long Beach, CA USA ----Original Message Follows---- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [EM] Book- Evaluation and Optimization of Electoral Systems Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2002 11:33:06 EST >From another list-- a book-- Evaluation and Optimization of Electoral Systems Editor Pietro Grilli di Cortona Publisher - SIAM/Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics February 1999 >From the series "SIAM Monographs on Discrete Mathematics and Applications" ISBN 0898714222 US$63.00 SIAM description: "systematic quantitative approach to the analysis, evaluation and design of electoral systems." _________________________________________________________________ Join the world�s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com
