When I asked if the election-utility approach has the sound motivational principles that the Pij approach has, here's what I meant:
The Pij approach directly addresses how one's utility expectation is affected by voting for i. The election-utility approach seems to merely assure us that if we vote for the above-election-utility candidates, we're going to improve our expectation, by helping candidates who are better than what we'd get if we didn't vote. But is there a demonstration that the voter's expectation is maximized by voting for all the candidates who are better than the voter's expectation in the election? Each of those looks like someone we should vote for, because he's worth more than the election, when looked at individually. But might it not be that if one candidate is likely to be in a tie with someone we like more, voting for him could lower our epectation? I like the election's-utility approach because that's something much easier to estimate than all Pij, or even all the Wi. But can it be shown to maximize the voter's utility expectation? As for the delta-p method, the delta-p are less fundamental, and farther from what's estimatable, as compared to the Pij, or especially the Wi. Estimating the Wi is at least not out of the question. Directly estimating the delta-p is out of the question. Richard would have to show a way to calculate estimates of the delta-p, one that makes good on that freedom from approximation that he spoke of. That method would have to not use approximations like the assumption that ties will be 2-way, and would have to not use the Pij to calculate the delta-p. Richard, what's a precise way to calculate an estimate of the delta-p? By the way, you left out Crannor's and Hoffman's ways of estimating the Pij, from the vote totals in a previous election. It seemed to me that Crannor's descripion of her method didn't give enough information about it. If anyone understands Crannor's method, would they explain it? It sounds good, because it avoids the great amount of calculation work and complexity of Hoffman's method. Mike Ossipoff _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.
