[EM] Sims - method terminology

[Jameson Quinn]

First off, I'd definitely support you sharing your source code, hopefully
under some open-source license (eg, BSD - the simplest "use it, change it,
and credit me"; or GPL, which also says "share your changes under the same
terms".) Aside from the source control hosts Leon mentions, there's also
Sourceforge and Google Code, which are more full-service, with bug tracking
and mailing lists and wikis. Anyway, however you go, I really have seen that
"wait until it's done before I share" is not the right attitude; even one
helping hand makes the trivial effort of sharing more than worth it.

Second, one comment on your method descriptions:

> > > Method  BestC   WorstC  Top     Middle  Bottom
> >  Dist    DistN
> > > CdlASnc 91.8%   1.1%    87.3%   10.4%   2.2%
> >  52.978  1.306
>
> Conditional Approval (sincere). This is an obscure method for which I
> recently started using the term CdlA. This is intended to be a three-slot
> method where the votes are counted repeatedly and voters add in their
> second-slot preferences when the leader after any previous round was a
> last-slot (i.e. non-)preference.
>
> Sincerely voting this isn't very realistic and I would've just deleted
> its results, except that it placed first here...
>

I'd thought of this method, and consider it a very good one if you're
willing to go with a non-summable, computationally-complex method. I am
surprised to hear you say that "sincerely voting this isn't very realistic".
True, it is not LNH, so truncation is possible; but I don't see truncation
as a dominant strategy here. For instance, if everyone else truncates,
sincerely voting can only improve your outcome. In fact, the result if your
bloc is the only sincere one is actually probably better for you than the
result if your bloc is the only truncators.*

So: if you expect others to truncate, you are sincere; if you expect others
to be sincere, your rational vote is to truncate. But since you actually
prefer the results of the first case to those of the second, your rational
mixed strategy is mostly sincere*. (And since pure strategies are unstable*,
I believe that this mixed strategy will be a unique strong Nash
equilibrium*, with no need for trembling-hand fiddles to make it unique).

*Much of the above is purely intuitive, so if you have a different
impression, I'd love to hear it. (The parts without asterisks are intuitive
too, but I have sketchy proofs in my head, so I'm a little more confident of
those parts).

JQ
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