Re: [EM] Reference for poll where experts endorsed approval?

2012-08-01 Thread Rob LeGrand
Jameson wrote:
 (Actually, I'm looking for all academic departments/institutes focused
 on voting systems/social choice. So far, I've found just one:

In case it's relevant, the Computational Social Choice Seminar is a
series of talks at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at
the University of Amsterdam:

   http://staff.science.uva.nl/~ulle/seminar/

They have grad students there doing work in that area, and there's a
dedicated course taught as well:

   http://staff.science.uva.nl/~ulle/teaching/comsoc/

--
Rob LeGrand
r...@approvalvoting.org

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Re: [EM] finding the beat path winner with just one pass through the ranked pairs

2011-12-09 Thread Rob LeGrand
Markus wrote:
 the runtime to calculate the strongest path from
 every candidate to every other candidate is O(C^3).
 However, the runtime to sort O(C^2) pairwise defeats
 is already O(C^4). So you cannot get a faster
 algorithm by sorting the pairwise defeats.

Can't you sort O(C^2) items in O(C^2 log C) time if you use a O(n log n)
algorithm such as heapsort?

 
--
Rob LeGrand
r...@approvalvoting.org
Citizens for Approval Voting
http://www.approvalvoting.org/


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Re: [EM] Automated Approval methods (was Single Contest)

2011-07-25 Thread Rob LeGrand
Kevin wrote:
 Yes, but if it were strategy-free somehow, I think it would be worth
 it. Real life isn't monotone. I don't imagine that all the prettier Yee
 diagrams would really look like that if voters were using information
 and strategy!

I may be missing something, but I don't see how you can have a
nonmonotonic method that is strategy-free.  For any example of
nonmonotonicity, you should be able to find a single voter that triggers
it--say, if that focal voter votes ABXC, then X wins, but if they vote
AXBC, then X loses.  Whoever wins when X loses, manipulability pops
up:

Case 1: A wins.  Then imagine that the focal voter sincerely thinks
ABXC.  Insincerely voting AXBC moves the winner from X to A, which
is a successful manipulation.

Case 2: B wins.  Then imagine that the focal voter sincerely thinks
ABXC.  Insincerely voting AXBC moves the winner from X to B, which
is a successful manipulation.

Case 3: C wins.  Then imagine that the focal voter sincerely thinks
AXBC.  Insincerely voting ABXC moves the winner from C to X, which
is a successful manipulation.

This proof may be either flawed or needlessly complex, but it's what
came to mind.

--
Rob LeGrand
r...@approvalvoting.org
Citizens for Approval Voting
http://www.approvalvoting.org/

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Re: [EM] Remember Toby

2011-06-03 Thread Rob LeGrand
Kathy wrote:
 Let all the voters vote for one or two candidates.

Considering this Approval-like method on its own, without any proxy
aspects, I see problems.  Capping the number of candidates that each
voter is allowed to approve at 2 destroys some of Approval's desirable
properties.  First, no longer is your best strategic vote necessarily
even weakly sincere; in other words, it will often be to your advantage
to approve B and not A even when you prefer A to B.  Second, even when
all voters have strict preferences over all candidates, there may be an
equilibrium that doesn't elect a sincere Condorcet winner.  As an overly
dramatic example, if the sincere preferences are

49:ABCDEF
 3:DCFEBA
48:FECDBA

One equilibrium, I claim, would be

49:A,B
 3:D
48:F,D

which elects D even though 97 of the 100 voters prefer C to D.  Just
going by intermediate results, as from polls, it might be very difficult
for C to emerge as a contender.

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Re: [EM] Help naming a new method

2011-04-03 Thread Rob LeGrand
Andy wrote:
 I have a new voting method and I think I need some help naming it.  Let
 me say, first of all, that I admit it may be too complicated for use by
 the general public.  It's a score aggregating method, like Score
 Voting.

 Each voter scores each candidate on a scale of 0-100.  Each candidate's
 votes are aggregated independently, with their societal score given by
 finding the largest number, x, such that x percent of the voters gave
 that candidate a grade of x or higher.

 So a candidate where 71% of the people gave a grade of 71 or higher
 (but the same can't be said of 71+epsilon) will get a final score of
 71.

 It shares a strategy-resistance property with the median that any voter
 whose score was above the societal score, if he were allowed to change
 his vote, could do nothing to raise the societal score.  (Also, a voter
 whose score was below the societal score could do nothing to lower the
 societal score.)  This means that if you're only grading one candidate
 (e.g. choosing an approval rating for the sitting president), then
 there is a strong incentive for everyone to submit an honest vote.

 It can be generalized to find the largest number, x, such that F(x)
 percent of the voters gave the candidate a grade of x or higher, for a
 non-decreasing function F.   F(x)=50, for example, is basically
 equivalent to find the median.  But anything more complicated than
 F(x)=x is probably hopeless for explaining to people.  And the diagonal
 function F(x)=x has some nice properties.  For example, one voter can
 never unilaterally move the output by more than 100/N, where N is the
 number of voters.

 I thought of this method about three years ago.  I've been sitting on
 it since then, proving things for my doctoral thesis, which I finished
 last fall.  I did present this method at the Public Choice Society
 meeting about a year ago.  And I told Drs. Balinski and Laraki about it
 some time ago.  They make mention of it in their recently published
 book Majority Judgment.

 I'd like to publish some things in a journal, but I'm thinking I may
 need a better name for the method.  So far, I've called it the linear
 median and the diagonal median.  I've considered the consensus
 median or the consensus score, but that may be misleading,
 associating it with consensus societies.

Hi Andy,

Please see chapter 3 of my dissertation:

   http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~legrand/dissertation.pdf

It motivates and describes a rating system I call AAR DSV (Average-
Approval-Ratings Declared-Strategy Voting) that is equivalent to the
system applied to each candidate in your linear median method.  The
motivation is based on how rational voters would vote to try to pull the
outcome of a Average-based rating system as close to their ideal point as
possible.  The chapter also outlines a continuous range of rating systems
that includes both the standard AAR DSV and Median systems (including the
generalized ones you mention), interpolating between them using a two-
dimensional parameterization, and uses data from Metacritic.com to find
the best rating system in that range.  I prove that, if all voters are
only interested in moving the outcome as close to their ideal point as
possible, all of these systems are nonmanipulable.  This
nonmanipulability of course disappears when these systems are applied to
each candidate in a single-winner election.  My recent research has dealt
with generalizing these rating systems to higher-dimensional voting/
outcome spaces of various shapes; I haven't considered applying them to
electing a single winner from a discrete set of candidates in a while.

I presented a paper on AAR DSV called Approval-rating systems that never
reward insincerity at the 2nd International Workshop on Computational
Social Choice (COMSOC-2008):

   http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~pwg/COMSOC-2008/

I'd like to see a copy of your doctoral thesis as well.

--
Rob LeGrand
r...@approvalvoting.org

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Re: [EM] IRV ballot pile count (proof of closed form)

2010-02-11 Thread Rob LeGrand
Abd wrote:
 34 A
 33 BC
 33 CB.

 The Condorcet winner is A, because in the two pairwise
 elections involving A, A wins

 AB, 34:33
 AC, 34:33.

Assuming that by the above votes you mean

34:AB=C
33:BCA
33:CBA,

A is not the Condorcet winner and is in fact the Condorcet loser, losing
both A:B and A:C by 34:66.  Perhaps you had in mind an example like

35:A
32:BC
33:C,

by which I mean

35:AB=C
32:BCA
33:CA=B.

In this example, C is the Condorcet winner even though C does not have a
majority over B.  I can see how this example could be seen as an
embarrassment to the Condorcet criterion, in that a good method might not
choose C as the winner.

--
Rob LeGrand
r...@approvalvoting.org
Citizens for Approval Voting
http://www.approvalvoting.org/


  

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Re: [EM] A computationally feasible method

2008-09-03 Thread Rob LeGrand
Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
 On the other hand, approximating may make strategy more difficult. I
 think Rob LeGrand wrote something about how approximations to minimax
 Approval obscured the strategy that would otherwise work.

Yes, you're thinking of

http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~legrand/legrand06fsm.pdf

in which our polynomial-time 3-approximation to fixed-size minimax is
shown to be nonmanipulable.  Exact FSM on the other hand is both
manipulable and NP-hard to compute.

I'm now at COMSOC '08 in Liverpool:

http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~pwg/COMSOC-2008/

Many interesting talks.  I'm told the papers will be available on the
website sometime after the conference is over.

--
Rob LeGrand, psephologist
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Citizens for Approval Voting
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Re: [Election-Methods] Matrix voting and cloneproof MMP questions

2008-07-09 Thread Rob LeGrand
Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
 You use movie site data for your AAR-DSV examples. Does AAR-DSV
 manipulability mean that a movie site that uses it would face
 difficulty telling users which movie is the most popular or highest
 rated? The manipulability proofs wouldn't harm them as strongly (since
 very few users rate all of the movies), but they would in principle
 remain, unless I'm missing something...

It all depends on what we assume the voters would be trying to do.  If
each voter is trying to move the overall rating of each movie as close as
possible to his/her ideal rating of that movie, without any regard to how
the other movies are rated, then AAR DSV is completely nonmanipulable.
On the other hand, if a voter is trying to affect which movie ends up
with the highest rating, voting insincerely may sometimes give an
advantage.

--
Rob LeGrand, psephologist
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Citizens for Approval Voting
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Re: [Election-Methods] Matrix voting and cloneproof MMP questions

2008-07-06 Thread Rob LeGrand
Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
 (On a related note, has anyone tried to use Range with LeGrand's
 Equilibrium Average instead of plain average?)

I don't recommend using Equilibrium Average (which I usually call AAR
DSV, for Average-Approval-Rating DSV) to elect winner(s) from a finite
number of candidates.  AAR DSV is nonmanipulable when selecting a single
outcome from a one-dimensional range, just as median (if implemented
carefully) is, but it is manipulable when used as a scoring function in
a way similar to how Balinski and Laraki proposed using median:

http://rangevoting.org/MedianVrange.html

For more on AAR DSV, please see chapter 3 of my now-completed
dissertation:

http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~legrand/dissertation.pdf

--
Rob LeGrand, psephologist
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Re: [Election-Methods] Landau and Schwartz set

2007-09-23 Thread Rob LeGrand
 I know that the Landau set is a subset of the Smith set, and I know
 that Schwartz set is a subset of the Smith set, but is Landau set the
 subset of the Schwartz set, or is the Schwartz set the subset of the
 Landau set?

Both are possible, so neither is generally true.  Given the votes

4:ABC
1:BCA
3:CAB

the Landau set is {A, B, C} and the Schwartz set is {A}.  Given the votes

3:ABCD
3:BCDA
2:CDAB
1:DABC

the Landau set is {A, B, C} and the Schwartz set is {A, B, C, D}.

--
Rob LeGrand, psephologist
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Citizens for Approval Voting
http://www.approvalvoting.org/


   

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Re: [Election-Methods] Landau and Schwartz set

2007-09-23 Thread Rob LeGrand
Kevin Venzke wrote:
 The defeats are AB, BC, A=C. What reasoning do you use to find that
 B and C are in the Landau set? I gather I don't have a complete
 understanding of what Landau refers to, but I'm very surprised if the
 definition is such that a Landau winner can fail to be a Schwartz
 winner.  This makes Landau seem less worthwhile to me, since Schwartz
 is more intuitive.

I'm using what I believe is Markus Schulze's definition of Landau
winners:

Candidate A is a Landau winner iff for every other candidate B at least
one of the following two statements is correct:
(1) A = B.
(2) There is a candidate C such that A = C = B.

where = means beats or ties pairwise.  It's the same thing as Smith
except that the beatpaths can be of length at most two.  You could easily
define a Schwartz-Landau set that may give you want you were expecting
by changing beats or ties pairwise in the above definition to beats
pairwise.  Such a set would always be a subset of the Landau set and of
the Schwartz set.

--
Rob LeGrand, psephologist
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Citizens for Approval Voting
http://www.approvalvoting.org/


  

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