Juho wrote:
On Jul 22, 2008, at 14:26 , Michael Allan wrote:
I'm grateful I was directed to this list. You're clearly experts. I
wish I could reply more completely right away (I should know better
than to start 2 separate threads). I'll just reply to Juho's
questions today, and tomorrow I'll look at Abd's work. (You've been
thinking about this longer than I have, Abd, and I need to catch up.)
1) All voters are candidates and it is possible that all voters consider
themselves to be the best candidate. Therefore the method may start from
all candidates having one vote each (their own vote). Maybe only
after some
candidates have numerous votes and the voter himself has only one vote
still, then the voter gives up voting for himself and gives his vote to
some of the frontrunners. How do you expect the method to behave from
this
point of view?
The basic rule of vote flow is: a vote stops *before* it encounters a
voter for a second time, and it remains held where it is. A vote is
always considered to have "encountered" its original caster
beforehand. So it is not possible to vote for oneself. It is
permitted, but the vote stops before it is even cast - there is no
effect.
Ok, not allowing voters to vote for themselves may to some extent solve
the problem. (Some voters may however decide to abstain for a while.)
This is a bit offtopic (again), but another idea that might be less
prone to strategy in the case of cyclical proxy candidacy occurred to
me: use eigenvector or Markov-based methods to distribute the deferred
power "smoothly" over the candidates in the cycle.
At this point, the method looks similar to the original PageRank used to
"vote" on web pages, where various web pages vote for the importance of
each other - and such voting chains may be cyclical.
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