On Jul 24, 2008, at 9:05 , Michael Allan wrote:
Rankings are determined by votes incoming, not votes held. This is
crucial. (It was only decided a couple of releases ago, so there may
inconstencies in the docs.)
Ok, this seems to bring the model closer to what Kristofer
Munsterhjelm proposed.
Large cycles will tend to be *structurally* un-stable - they will tend
to fall apart and not re-form. But I doubt they will be *dynamically*
unstable.
I'm quite confident that the possibility of continuous cyclic changes
in continuous elections (due to cycles in the group opinions; A
preferred over B, B preferred over C and C preferred over A) exists
since that is a very general property of voting methods. The problem
may not appear often and it may be that the cyclic behaviour won't
last long for other reasons, but in theory that risk exists.
You're pointing to a tension
between voting for competence in communication, on the one hand, and
competence in a specialty, on the other.
I don't see any bad tensions. I just thought that it would be good to
state it clearly if the proposed method is not intended to be just an
election method but also has another target of creating a permanent
communication structure among the voters. The change makes the
evaluation criteria and questions and comments quite different.
What happens if two candidates
vote for each other (tight cycle), in order to formalize a kind of
partnership between them?
If the incoming votes are the ones to be counted then both will get
more votes. Sounds like a good strategy, except that the one with
less original incoming votes will now get as many incoming votes as
the other one.
Here's one more potential problem case. If some candidate receives
votes from too many directions then some of the voters should switch
to not voting this candidate directly (to make the tree structure
less flat). If many of them have about the same number of incoming
votes they may be reluctant to change their vote since they'd prefer
other voters making the move first and thereby letting them stay
closer to the root of the tree (instead of ending up close to the
leaves).
Juho
___________________________________________________________
All New Yahoo! Mail Tired of [EMAIL PROTECTED]@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
