From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Sorry, I appear to have been an idiot. Peter de Blanc > answered my complaints at > http://www.spaceandgames.com/?p=8 > > and it looks to me like I NOW have to agree with Forest Simmons that > this IS a great new contribution to voting theory. > Also, I showed there in my comment how to generalize their scheme > by adding a parameter P. It looks liek the best P is P=0.99 or > so, not P=0.5 (their value) or P=0+ (my value from before). I wonder if it might be worth having the voter write their honest utilities on the ballot. The 'backend' would then convert that vote into an optimised ballot for inclusion. If it truely is the optimal strategy to be honest, then there would be no incentive to lie. However, it would mean that very low probability of winning candidates would not get lost in the noise. For example, they could just have people write their truthful utilities. The backend would then just get the square-root of all their utilities and then renormalise so that it sums to unity. This would give the probabilities for each candidate. What about something like the following for a non-random method. Prior to the election: Determine the probability of each candidate having a total vote within a% of the highest other candidate. If a is low, then this should be proportional to the probability of the candidate ending up in a tie. It seems reasonable, but is that true ? Anyway, call this probability Pc for the cth candidate. Each voter votes a number of votes for each candidate and the candidate with the highest total wins. The benefit of giving a vote for a candidate is the probability of the candidate being in a tie times the utility of the candidate. Each vote cast by the voter should be weighted by: 1/sum( Pc*(votes cast for candidate c)^N ) This means that votes for an candidate who is unlikely to win cost almost nothing (as Pc is tiny), thus eliminating the spoiler effect. Using a different power than square/square root would mean that the probability of the highest utility candidate winning could be increased/decreased. However, setting the power to high, would introduce alot of noise to the system. The probabilities could be determined by the betting markets. The problem would be a candidate with say, a 1 in 1000 chance of winning would give a noisy Pc. Making 'a' larger helps here but may reduce accuracy. It also means that voting for a sure winner is costless. Raphfrk -------------------- Interesting site "what if anyone could modify the laws" www.wikocracy.com ________________________________________________________________________ Check Out the new free AIM(R) Mail -- 2 GB of storage and industry-leading spam and email virus protection.
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