[EM] Responses to some of Forest's ideas
Richard Moore
rmoore4 at home.com
Wed Jul 25 18:43:30 PDT 2001
Forest Simmons wrote:
>
> I vaguely remember that there was a sudden realization that the above mean
> criterion was necessary but not sufficient for optimizing expected utility
> in a zero-info environment.
I think it's necessary and sufficient for zero-info, large
populations.
>
> I also remembered that you made excellent progress on the small population
> case, and (prematurely?) gave you credit for an asymptotic solution in the
> large population case :-)
>
> Forest
I did suggest a formula, I just never came up with a good
test to see if it's accurate. It asymptotically approaches
the mean for large populations so it should be reasonably
close for populations of say a couple dozen, but it probably
has some error for really small populations (say, less than
10). Also, it depended more on the number of "yes" votes
that are expected to be cast, rather than the number of
voters. I don't have it handy but if I come across it in my
saved e-mail I'll post it again.
Richard
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