On 25 Nov 2002 at 13:13, Adam H Tarr wrote: > The more important issue is that it's very easy for these problems to > crop up in margins, and it's easy to recognize them when they do, and > it's easy to foul up the results just by truncating (which is a very > natural thing for the voter to do). In the winning votes examples, the > problems only show up when there's a lot of truncation to start with, and > then they only show up in a pretty fractured race where it would probably > be hard to tell whether truncation will help or hurt you.
I understand and I agree that reducing incentive for truncation is important. A downside is that if more than one disapproved option is ranked then at least one disapproved option will receive more votes then any nonvoted "no opinion" options. Thus, voter's who both disapprove and have no opinion of one or more options each should either rank just their approved optons and no more than one of the disapproved options or fully rank all of the options (with the no opinion options ranked equally at the approval cutoff). The first approach is an emotionally difficult decision of how best not to fully express oneself, similar to the situation facing the voter in Approval contests, and the latter approach is onerous like Borda contests, especially when there are many options. Faced with these two choices, voters will be tempted to take the easier third approach of just voting their full set of approved and disapproved and hope for the best even though this gives their disapproved options more votes than their no opinion options. Nevertheless, I agree that the benefit of less manipulativeness with wv done this way, if substantial enough, is good reason for favoring wv. And the benefit for undermining truncation strategy does appear to be substantial. However, as Blake Cretney notes, the strategy opportunity, instead of being eliminated by wv, is moved elsewhere. The winning strategy for wv becomes random voting of the lower ranks. This is obviously correct since random voting of the lower ranks "turns wv into margins" like 1/2 votes does. Granted, truncation is both an easier and more obvious strategy than random voting, but all it takes is some die tosses and coin flips behind the curtain or a little time with a home or office computer or calculator with a psuedo-random generator before going the polls once the word gets out. So on balance I am still not convinced that the truncation stability benefit of wv outweighs the costs. ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
