On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 5:02 PM, Jameson Quinn <[email protected]> wrote: > This is a great idea at its heart, but I can see a couple of problems which > need fixing. For one thing, you didn't specify that the sum of the means for > all vote types must be 1.
Actually, it would probably be better to require 1 ballot type to have a mean of 1 and the rest have a mean of zero. Otherwise, it isn't the same voting system. > For another, as stated, this raises the possibility of negative totals for > certain vote > types - something which many voting systems couldn't handle. For a third, if > you > keep the variance for each vote type constant, then total variance in "where > my > vote goes" depends on the square root of the number of vote types - especially > problematic for Range voting, which has an unmanageably large number of > vote types, even for few candidates. My proposal resolves most of those issues, after the votes are case, each ballot has a probability of p to be excluded from the count. However, for most of the theorems that that this would depend on, the variance wouldn't actually matter. You could set it that the variance is 1 part in a billion. This would create the slope to prevent the (meta-stable) equilibria. > To be clear: in the Gandhi/Hitler case, the situation where 100% vote Hitler > somehow against their will, is not a Nash equilibrium, because each voter > sees that there is some finite (though smaller than the number of atoms in > the visible universe) probability that a poisson distribution around 1 will > be greater than a poisson distribution around the 99,999 other voters still > voting Hitler. Right, it adds a possibility for each vote to affect the result. > However, I actually think that this distribution is not realistic. OTOH, it is also unrealistic that voters would only care about the outcome. Most people would prefer a situation where their favourite loses 55-45 than one where they lose 70-30. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
