2011/10/28 Kevin Venzke <[email protected]> > Hi Jameson, > > I am a little short on time, to read this as carefully as I would like, but > if you have a > moment to answer in the meantime: > > --- En date de : *Ven 28.10.11, Jameson Quinn <[email protected]>* a > écrit : > > voting is best. But how do you deal with strategy? Figuring out what > strategies are sensible is the relatively easy part; whether it's > first-order rational strategies (as James Green-Armytage has worked > out<http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~armytage/svn2010.pdf>) > or n-order strategies under uncertainty (as Kevin Venzke does) > > 3. Try to use some rational or cognitive model of voters to figure out how > much strategy real people will use under each method. This is hard work and > involves a lot of assumptions, but it's probably the best we can do today. > > > As you might have guessed, I'm arguing here for method 3. Kevin Venzke has > done work in this direction, but his assumptions --- that voters will look > for first-order strategies in an environment of highly volatile polling data > --- while very useful for making a computable model, are still obviously > unrealistic. > > [end quotes] > > I am very curious if you could elaborate on my assumption that voters will > "look for > first-order strategies in an environment of highly volatile polling data." > I'm not totally > sure what you mean by first-order vs. n-order strategies, >
First-order strategies are strategies which work assuming all other factions' votes are unchanged. Second-order strategies either respond to, or defend against, first-order strategies. I guess that your system, through iterated polling, deals with "respond to", but it is incapable of "defend against". > and whether your criticism > of unrealism is based on "voters will look for..." part or on the "highly > volatile polling > data" part. > Some of the former (lack of defense), but mostly the latter. Also, it's not so much a criticism, as a pointer for what comes next. You have *absolutely* gone farther than anyone else I know of in exploring the motivators and consequences of strategy across voting systems, and if my appreciation of that fact didn't come through, I'm sorry. (Green-Armytage has some answers you don't about motivators, and Smith's IEVS has some about consequences, but your work is by far the best for combining the two.) > I wonder if this volatility is a matter of degree or a general question of > approach. > Well, I've never seen you try to justify the volatility in terms of realism. It's a computational trick, to prevent excessive equilibrium, from what I can tell. That is, your unrealistic (perfectly rational in some ways but utterly lacking in any meta-rationality) voters may need this unrealistic assumption to give more-realistic answers, and if so, then "fixing" this one issue is not the answer. (If there were no volatility, I think that your system would end up comparing a lot of 100%/0% numbers, which doesn't discriminate very well between systems.) > > I want to note in case it's not clear that when I talk about what > strategies voters are > using, that is just a reporting mechanism that has awareness of the > relationship > between voters' sincere preferences and how they actually voted. The voters > have > no idea what they are doing in strategic or sincere terms. > Yes, I understand that. Cheers, Jameson
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