> Lundell: > Arrow would not, I think, quarrel with the claim that a cardinal ballot has a > pragmatic/operational "meaning" as a function of its use in determining a > winner. > > But but it's an unwarranted leap from that claim to use the ballot scores as > a measure of utility. Arrows objection to cardinal scores, or one of them, is > that they are not and cannot be commensurable across voters.
--(1) using, not range voting, but DOUBLE RANGE VOTING, described here: http://rangevoting.org/PuzzRevealU2.html the ballot scores ARE utilities for a strategic-honest voter. Any voter who foolishly uses non-utilities as her scores on her ballot, will get a worse election result in expectation. This was not an "unwarranted leap," this was a "new advance" because the Simmons/Smith double-range-voting system is the first voting system which (a) is good and which (b) incentivizes honest utility-revelation (and only honest) by voters. --(2) I agree that it is difficult to measure utilities commensurably across voters. However, range voting and double range voting do not do so, and do not claim to do so. What IS commensurable across voters, are the scores voters give to candidates (since those by the rules of the voting system lie within fixed bounds). Double range voting will extract honest utilities from each voter, but not commensurably, i.e. with different and not-known scaling factors for each voter. As a result, neither range voting, nor double range voting, are "perfect" regret-free voting systems, and they were never claimed to be. What I am claiming, is that a double range voting ballot (honest part) has a MEANING. It has a very definite, very unique, very clear, meaning, which due to the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem is clearer than the meaning of ballots in any (rank-order, deterministic) voting system Arrow ever considered in his life. NO such rank-order system exists or ever can exist, in which meaning is as clear as in double range voting. Therefore, Arrow's "meaning"-based argument against score-type and in favor of rank-order-type ballots, is busted and has no validity. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
