[I tried to post this about a week ago, but it was returned from EM, and so I'm re-posting it]
Suppose there are no 2 candidates who seem almost sure to be the top 2, but that it isn't a 0-info election. You don't have the information needed for the "best frontrunner" strategy, or the extensions of it that I suggested. One could use the election-utility strategy, voting for those candidates who are so good that you'd like to have them as president instead of holding the election. Or you could use Tideman's estimating method, using the probability that candidate i will win for estimating Pi, the probability that if, when all the votes but yours are counted, if some 2 candidates are in a tie for 1st, or are the top 2, differing by only one vote, then i will be one of those 2. It's also assumed that the probability of candidate i being the upper in that near-tie is equal to his probability of being the lower in that near-tie. Pij can then be estimated by assuming that: Pij = Pji = Pi*Pj. But it seems to me to be easier to estimate the probability that some particular candidate will be the villain that you'll have a chance to make someone better beat. And the probability that some other candidate will be the hero that you can make beat him. One could make those estimates exhaustively to estimate the Pij directly, or could use them to get estimates for the Pi. This is vaguely described, because there are probably various ways these additional estimates could be made, and because I haven't tried it yet. Mike Ossipoff _________________________________________________________________ Join the world�s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
