On Dec 2, 2008, at 1:24 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Yes. Preference can be determined, generally, rather easily, by one
of two methods. The first method is pairwise comparison. With a
series of pairwise comparisons, we can construct a rank order.
Usually. It's possible, because different issue spaces get involved
in each choice, that this will result in a Condorcet cycle. But that
is rare.
The second method, though, bypasses Condorcet cycles, because it is
essentially a Range method! That is, we look at the entire set of
candidates and pick our favorite, then set this aside, having
determined the rank of that candidate. We then look again, etc. We
can also run this from the bottom, which of these is worst -- as far
as we know (same restriction on the top, by the way, maybe one of
those middle candidates is actually quite good, but we just don't
know it yet. This is one reason why runoff voting can be much better
than fixed-preference voting theory would predict.)
There's a third method, namely the one used for STV/IRV voting: pick
an overall favorite from the entire field, and then iterate, in each
iteration excluding already-ranked candidates from consideration.
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