Kevin Venzke wrote:
Hi Kristofer,

--- En date de : Lun 13.6.11, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <[email protected]> a 
écrit :
If you want something that deters burial strategy, how
about what I called FPC? Each candidate's penalty is equal
to the number of first-place votes for those who beat him
pairwise. Lowest penalty wins.
Burying a candidate may help in engineering a cycle, but it
can't stack more first-place votes against him.
Unfortunately, it's not monotone.

That's a simple and interesting method. I can see the mechanism is to
remove control of the *strength* of the Y:Z win from the X voters. Then
measuring strength as FPs is fairly likely to correctly discard the win
of the least important candidate.

I guess that anything else that does something similar would have a
similar advantage.

FPC has some problems, though, as Jameson Quinn pointed out. It is possible to reduce the compromise incentive by doing something like Schwartz//FPC (as you'd have to know who would be in the cycle), but then it's no longer summable. Note that Schwartz,FPC doesn't reduce the compromise incentive as much.

So let's consider what properties a base method must satisfy. Say we have X, Y, and Z. Y is the CW, and X voters want to bury Y so that X>Y>Z>X in that order of strength. If they accomplish this, Y will be beaten by X and Z, so the property should be:

Voters who vote Y below top must not be able to increase the scores of X and Z by burying Y.

Or, a weaker criterion:

A ballot that ranks Y last must not decrease the points given to the candidates still ahead of Y if Y is raised. (This is just considering from the reverse situation, "after" the burial, wrt before the burial.)

The only two methods I can see that satisfy the former are FPP and Approval with implicit cutoff. But if you have Approval, you can just as easily use C//A and not have to deal with nonmonotonicity.

The weaker criterion seems to be some variant of Later-no-harm, but not exactly LNHarm. The point of the weaker criterion is that it should be obvious to the X voters that turning X>Y>Z into X>Z>Y will elect Z before it elects X. But it doesn't quite feel right...

Any ideas as to which methods could be used?

Perhaps burial/compromising incentive in Condorcet ultimately resolves to the same sort of Approval chicken. In a method like FPC with three candidates, it's no problem voting sincerely when the third candidate is weak (and buriers pose no threat under conventional Condorcet methods when the same is the case), and by symmetry, it also isn't a problem when the "third" candidate is by far the strongest, but when they're equal, then strategy can work -- and this is also where Approval runs into trouble.

Yet some Condorcet methods resist strategy better than others. In particular, certain nonmonotone methods seem to do so well. Maybe this involves the risk of the burial going badly - if it's chaotic (not monotone), the buriers won't know when it could backfire and when it couldn't. Not so sure about that, either.

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