On Mar 5, 2007, at 6:41 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
It is also questionable if it always makes sense to select the
favourite alternatives of those votes that have strong feelings and
not to respect the opinions of voters with milder feelings that much.
If we were deciding a series of choices, and the "strong" and
"mild" feeling voters were always the same people, then, I'd
suggest, as the strong got their way each time, the "mild" voters
would begin to consider themselves unjustly deprived. They would
become strong in their feelings and votes. Unless they agreed that
that the "strong" getting what they want was just.
You are getting dangerously close to the often stated claim that
Range would turn to Approval in the presence of insincere voter
groups. :-)
I don't think that Condorcet methods were developed to maximize
utility; rather I think that the idea of the pairwise winner was
seen as intuitively correct.
Probably a typical person studying Condorcet does not see it as a
better utility function than Range. I believe it is typical that
Condorcet sympathies are based on its ability to reach pretty good
utility and strategy resistance at the same time.
Maybe many also think that due to the varying sincere preference
strengths it is better to give each voter one vote (all of same
strength) (=one man one vote principle) (A>B>C means A>B, A>C and
B>C, all with strength 1). This can be considered ideal by some
although this does not aim at maximising utility but at minimising
the number of voters that are unhappy (=never mind how unhappy they
are) with the selection. (Condorcet typically compares only one
pairwise decision at a time, which may be considered a weakness, but
I leave that discussion to another time.)
Juho
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