At 01:23 AM 8/21/2007, Paul Kislanko wrote: >There is no such thing as "utility" to a voter. That is an abstraction used >by analysts for which I have seen no definition that is useful to me, a >voter, despite having pleaded for one on this list for at least three years >now.
The term is widely used, and it has generally accepted meanings, though often lacking precision. There are certain assumptions underlying the concept. And there are equivalent terms. Expected Satisfaction is one. If Candidate A wins this election, how satisfied would you be? 0 Very Dissatisfied 1 Moderately Dissatisfied 2 Slightly Dissatisfied 3 Neither Satisfied nor Dissatisfied 4 Slightly Pleased 5 Moderately Pleased 6 Very Pleased. This could be a Range 6 ballot. It is usually a bad idea to claim that something that many find a useful concept does not exist. It does, at least in some way.... Utility is used in game theory to find optimum actions. Each possible choice is assigned a utility, some value. In some cases, this can be done accurately; if, for example, various outcomes have economic value, they might be valued in dollars. There are voting schemes where one essentially bids with taxes. (I find this idea interesting, and not necessarily plutocratic, if what is being decided with the "votes" is how taxes will be spent. But it is not my purpose here to examine this kind of proposal, it is merely an example where "utility" has a very specific meaning for a given voter. It would be, in this case, how much you were willing to bid to get the outcome you want.) The utilities in Range Voting are really the same as utilities in game theory. In simulations, it is assumed that people have some kind of internal process for assigning value to candidates. While, in fact, there may be no such valuation, rather people consider candidates pairwise and rank through a series of pairwise comparisons, people also have a sense of preference strength, and, through pairwise comparisons and preference strengths, one can estimate a scale. Can there be a Condorcet Cycle? Not in the simulations, but, in reality, it might be possible, for when we compare two candidates, we may compare them based on a particular set of characteristics that are salient for that pair; with another pair, another set may be used, and thus it becomes possible to have a cycle. The simulations that I'm aware of use "issue space." If I am correct, it is presumed that there are a series of issues, with a linear scale associated with each. Voters and candidates are assigned positions on each of these scales, according to some distribution considered realistic (it would not realistically be a linear distribution; rather the opinions of people cluster). The distance between the voter's position and the candidate's position is "regret" if that candidate is elected, on that scale. I don't know, actually, if only one issue scale is used, or if there are a series in vector space. In any case, resulting from this is an assignment of numerical values to each candidate. In the simulations, this is the utility. That, then, is translated into a Range vote using various strategies. Range votes are, however, just votes. They are not "utilities." But *if* there are commensurable utilities, and voters vote Range Votes proportional to them, Range optimizes utility summed over all voters. If the utilities are "relative expected satisfaction," somewhat like what I listed above, Range, then, optimizes overall voter satisfaction with the result, minimizing dissatisfaction. Obviously, there is a series of assumptions being made. However, they are reasonable ones. We are quite capable of ranking candidates, and, in addition, of estimating preference strengths. This, then, means that we are capable of *rating* candidates. Rating is just ranking with varying spread between the ranks. Rating is utility is expected voter satisfaction; however, in the end, all of this is theory and perhaps rationalization, the reality is that the voter is casting votes which have effects on the outcome. It just happens that Range apparently *does* optimize overall satisfaction, not perfectly, but better than other methods on the table. Even if voters vote "strategically," i.e., choose the votes which game theory would indicate are optimal. It's really rather silly, the objection about strategic voting in Range. We want people to express what they want, and how strongly they want it. If they think they gain advantage by voting strongly, *they have strong preferences,* at least if they are sane. (There are hysterics who make everything a matter of strong preference. But Range Voting is not turning society over to hysterics. There are probably hysterics on all sides of the issues, and they average out. The presence of "hysterical voters" -- who would vote quite as people claim strategic voters would vote -- merely shifts the election toward Approval, which is really the same method, just more black-and-white, and, it seems, the presence of even a few voters who vote intermediate ratings improves the outcome. It may be like adding high-frequency noise to a signal to increase precision in measuring it, a trick that really works even though it sounds counter-intuitive) >If you can't define "utility", don't use that in any argument. If you can, >please do so. Let me put it this way: utility is as well or better defined than many concepts which are routinely used on this list. The term has a range of meanings, from informal, where it is simply a synonym for "value," without insisting upon some numerical assignment, to more technical usages. I've written quite a bit on the Range list about how utilities are converted to votes. It is assumed that we have some internal scale which weighs candidates, giving them some value from maximally negative to maximally positive. These maximums are actually the strongest possible opinions we could hold, far stronger than we would normally hold, they are the limits of human experience. Different people, I assume, are capable of different ranges of experience, so these utilities are not strictly commensurable. However, if we equate the distance between minimum and maximum for all people, we come up with what I've called the "first normalization." Smith and others, I think, have used underlying utilities that are of this kind, often expressed as a real number in the range of 0 to 1. It would probably correspond better to human experience to use -1 to +1, being an expression of maximum aversion to maximum attraction, but for our purposes here, the absolute range does not matter. We are going to normalize it all to a single scale for everyone. *Then* comes the "second normalization," where the candidate set may come into play. The utilities described above are often termed absolute utilities, though they are not truly absolute. Nevertheless, they are presumed to be independent of the candidate set. But when we vote in a Range election, normally we do not have anywhere near the full range of possible utilities represented, we don't have, as I've termed them, the Messiah and Antichrist both on the ballot, we don't usually have either of them. If we did, I missed it. I'm going to assume that Mr. Kislanko has a sincere question about what utilities mean, practically, as a voter. I've written about this on the Range list, but here is an attempt to describe how to create a set of normalized utilities. I'm going to describe an algorithm that is strategically optimal or at least close to it. Yet it is also "sincere," though not necessarily "fully sincere," which is problematic. Take the set of candidates on the ballot or reasonably as write-ins and select the frontrunners, those considered to be possible winners. Examine this set and identify your favorite. Also identify the opposite, the least-preferred. Assign the rating of 100% to your favorite. Assign the rating of 0% to your least preferred. Remember, these are the frontrunners, your favorite might not be among them. For every candidate preferred to the frontrunners, also rate the candidate at 100%, and for every candidate to which you would prefer any frontrunner, rate that candidate at 0%. Now, take any remaining candidates andIdentify clones among these and consider them as one candidate, N is the number of candidates after clones have been merged. Rank them and then assign them a preliminary rating, in steps of 100/(N+1), which will evenly space them across the range of 0-100. Then consider if the preference strengths so assigned are reasonable. For example, if N was 1, the spread given above would place that single candidate midway between max and min. If the candidate seems better than that, nudge the vote up, if lower, nudge it down, until the ratings gap seems to correspond to a sense of preference strength. Instead of doing the spread above, evenly distributing the candidates to start, it might be simpler to tack in one candidate at a time, starting with the most important. Remember, if a candidate is not as good as the best frontrunner, but still quite good, this candidate should properly be rated close to 100%, and similar applies to the bottom end. It is not an exact thing. But people make judgements like this all the time,and Range has been used for polls for as long as I can remember. People know how to rate! In the end, what one is doing, though, is adjusting fractions of a vote. It does not have to be terribly accurate. It will average out over many voters.... That it will average out also means that you can simply set an Approval cutoff and rate candidates better than that at 100% and candidates less than that at 0%. There is nothing offensive or insincere about this, though it provides less detail about your preferences, and, for various reasons, it somewhat increases your risk of regret.... but it's simpler, for sure. It is entirely unclear that we will see high-resolution Range soon in public elections. But seeing Approval (I call Range 1) or the next step up, I call Range 2 (Cardinal Ratings 3), is much more possible. MSNBC has a number of polls up that are Range 2. (The ratings are -, 0, +, and they report the percentage of voters who voted each, which provides more information than simply reporting the sums. It's quite interesting!) ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
