On Jan 25, 2010, at 4:07 PM, Terry Bouricius wrote:
Would we agree that voting methods do best when voters give their
sincere rankings to avoid GIGO distortion?
Yes, that generally reduces GIGO distortion (in some methods strategic
voting is the norm and easy enough and these votes can be considered
sincere). Sincere voting has also other benefits like making voting
easy and increases trust in the system/results in general.
Since all voting methods can be subject to strategic voting
strategies with incomplete, exaggerated or insincere ballot
information, might it not be a good idea to select two or more
voting methods with different (ideally contrary) inherent strategy
options, and then select the vote tabulation algorithm by lot AFTER
the ballots are cast? This might give all voters an incentive to
give sincere ballot information, since that would be the safest
individual strategy.
That's an interesting approach. Maybe one should have some concrete
proposals to be able to compare the benefits and the problems. The
resulting randomness means in principle some deviation from picking
the best winners, and some of the original strategies might still be
usable (voter picks a strategy that improves the results with one
method and is not too bad in the other method), but if the method is
well planned the benefits may be bigger than the problems and added
complexity.
Alternatively, the threat of assigning all offices by lot might be
used as a stick to prompt all voters to come to a unanimous
agreement using an iterative or "bidding" process.
Yes, if the resulting level of randomness is acceptable in the
results. In this case the randomness of the results may be bigger than
in the first proposed approach above.
Juho
Terry Bouricius
----- Original Message -----
From: Juho
To: election-methods Mailing List
Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 5:59 AM
Subject: Re: [EM] Professorial Office Picking
Here's one simple approach.
- all voters rank all the rooms
- use Borda like personal utility values => last room = 0 points,
one but last = 1 point etc. (also other than this kind of linear
scale could be used)
- find the room allocation that gives the highest sum of utilities
- if there is a tie one can use seniority to break it
- the utility values of each voters are multiplied by some
seniority factor and then summed up again
- the factors could be quite small if one just wants to break
the ties (e.g. 1.0001, 1.0002)
This tie breaking approach is intended to work so that if there is
for example some room that all consider to be the best then that
room would be given to the most senior voter.
Any chances to work?
Juho
P.S. There could be also preferences like "I want a room next to my
closest colleagues". If one wants to support also such preferences
one could allow the voters to rank all the possible room allocation
scenarios and then use some Condorcet method to pick the best
allocation. Since the number of different room allocations may often
be too large for manual ranking one would need some mechanism to
derive the rankings from some simpler set of parameters. One could
e.g. use a fixed questionnaire with a list of questions that the
voters could answer and give different weights. These answers could
then be used to rate each room allocation scenario. In theory one
could also allow voters to give their own algorithm (this is however
probably too complex though for most use cases) that takes a room
allocation scenario as input and rates it (or gives directly a
ranking of all the allocations (or why not even pairwise preferences
(that could lead to personal preference cycles))).
On Jan 23, 2010, at 5:37 PM, Michael Rouse wrote:
Steven E. Landsburg (author of The Armchair Economist), had an
interesting problem here: http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/01/21/office-politics/
(in reference to an original question of the New York Times ethics
column here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03FOB-Ethicist-t.html)
Basically, you have a bunch of professors of different seniority
wanting a bunch of rooms of different desirability. The original
article at the Times suggested a lottery. Steven Landsburg
suggested a market, where professors bid what they wanted for a
particular room.
Here's my comment:
******
Why not use a rank order ballot grid? Have room locations across
the top (x-axis) and people’s names down the left (y-axis). Each
professor could rank the rooms in order of their own preference,
and rank the potential occupant in each room in order of
preference, all on one handy grid. People could then trade their
votes (or something more tangible for votes) in order to get the
room they want. On a certain date, finalize the votes, determine
the allocation of rooms to maximize overall satisfaction, and start
moving in.
It might be difficult to find the peak utility order (probably NP-
hard), but it should be manageable — you probably don’t have to
worry about hundreds of professors, and that’s what computers are
for. Plus, if a professor leaves, you might be able to determine
more easily who gets his or her office.
As an interesting extension, it may be possible to come up with a
similar way to match students, professors, periods, and classes,
though that would be even more complex. It would be kind of fun to
watch a course election, though, with groups lobbying for
particular lectures at particular times, or banding together to get
the professor they want.
******
I was wondering if those on this list had other suggestions. I make
no claim as to the suitability of my suggestion, I just thought it
was an interesting problem.
Michael Rouse
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for
list info
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for
list info
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for
list info
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
