It seems to me that information levels follow a spectrum that goes from perfect information through partial information through zero information and then further down below zero to misinformation and disinformation.
I believe that Approval tends to do as well as the best Condorcet methods in maximizing the fraction of the electorate who find the winner to be acceptable, at least when operating in the non-negative information zone. Its robustness leads me to suspect that it will make a good showing in the negative information setting as well. The existence of this negative information zone is what makes manipulability an issue, as far as I'm concerned. Does anybody have any insights into the relative performance of different methods (assuming sophiticated voters) in the face of disinformation? I assume sophisticated voters because all it takes is one respected sophisticated voter in each faction to effectively convert the election into a sophisticated voter election. There are at least two cases that interest me: (1) The experts base their strategy decisions on the basis of misleading polls without being aware that the polls are intentionally misleading. (2) The experts know that the polls are intentionally misleading, and can make educated guesses about which part of the polls consist of disinformation. It seems pretty obvious that the USA 2000 election was in an environment of disinformation, and that this is what we can expect in most big money public elections here in the USA. Another good reason for heeding the idea by which Joe W. has been seized! Forest ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
