On Feb 21, 2011, at 4:06 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: > > There might also be a trade-off. If you have a certain election where a > candidate wins, that election might be made up of honest ballots (in which > case it's good that the candidate wins), or of strategic ballots (in which a > metod that resists strategy should elect another candidate); but the method > can't know which is the case because all it's got are the ballots themselves, > free of any context. Looking at the structure of election methods may let us > know more about where that trade-off actually resides, though, or in simpler > terms: how strategy-resistant a method can be and still be a good method.
On a related note, one of the problems with burial-prone methods is that burial is a simple, intuitive and attractive strategy that can be easily employed by relatively naive voters. It's a perverse incentive precisely because of KM's point above: the method is faced with an unknown mix of sincere and strategic ballots. GIGO. By contrast, non-monotonicity is relatively benign (in this sense), in that it's very hard for a voter to come up with a practical voting strategy to take advantage of it. Among other things, voters don't have enough information about the detailed preferences (and strategies) of the other voters to successfully strategize themselves; there's little to be gained by voting other than sincerely. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
