I've just noticed that I said that, in Myerson's election model that I mentioned, the voter votes for the candidate who promises him the most money. What I should have said is that a candidate's utility to a voter is the amount of money that s/he promises to that voter, and the voter votes according to that and the strategy of the particular method being tested. One might first expect that Approval would cause candidates to promise more to more voters, but maybe the reason why Approval does better than IRV in that regard has to do with the fact the candidate only has so much that he can distribute, and he can only assure so many voters that he will give them more than the average of what the other candidates will give them. He loses by spreading his bribes so thinly that he isn't promising above that threshold. In IRV, the candidate can concentrate all his promises on a few people to whom he offers more than anyone else, or divide them so thinly that lots of voters are promised 2nd-to-least by him. The 2nd one doesn't sound promising. If a submajority group rank him 1st, and everyone else has no use for him at all, that doesn't sound like a winner either. Maybe his best strategy is inbetween, and it doesn't sound unreasonable that it could turn out that that strategy has him spreading his promises more thinly than he would in Approval. I emphasize that this is all speculation, and that I make no guarantee that these statements are right. It's been a long time since I saw the article. As I said, Myerson found that Approval doesn't have the candidate trying to please as many people as he does in IRV. Mike Ossipoff _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.
