[EM] Thoughts on a nomination simulation

[Kevin Venzke]

Hello,

The last thing I did with my simulation is check whether on average a
candidate would prefer to have withdrawn (considering the results of
thousands of trials of one position) than stand, with the assumption that
they care what happens when they lose. (I'm not sure that's actually a
good assumption: It would be better to assume the voters are the ones who
care, and don't support a candidate who spoils the election.)

I got odd results. It could very well be a bug. But for example I found
that (sincere) FPP had very few scenarios where a candidate would prefer
to exit the race. Maybe it's because I had filtered out uncompetitive
elections. But, even if FPP can handle some three-way races doesn't mean
that we can score FPP based on them, with the assumption that they will
occur.

That seems like a big problem with my simulation, that there are always
three candidates, and no check for incentives for more or fewer to be
nominated.

Over the past couple of years I've made a couple attempts at writing a
nomination simulation, where candidates in turn decide whether they want
to stand somewhere else in issue space. To this I could add the 
possibility of exiting or entering the race. I've had problems getting
this simulation to work well at all, but assuming I could figure it out,
I might be able to discover specific stable situations for a given method
(with a given strategy and information availability).

Though this still would not (easily) give me probabilities of scenarios
occuring. I guess for each method I would have a fairly short list of
stable positions, and could find average utilities for each position.

I'm curious if anyone else has put thought into this topic...

Kevin Venzke