[EM] Simulations

[Forest Simmons]

On Thu, 31 May 2001, Richard Moore wrote:

<snip>

> 
> 3. For Plurality, Borda, and Approval, I modeled strategic
> voting as follows: I randomly designated two front runners
> from the 5-candidate field.

....
> 
> I originally tried to select front runners based on the
> product of a candidate's MP and a random number, but the 
> result of this technique was that the support for the 
> top-rated candidate was, more often than not, boosted by 
> front-runner status, and all three methods improved with 
> strategic voting. Since this struck me as a dubious result, 
> I decided random selection of front runners was a more
> valid technique.
> 

Why not estimate who the front runners would be based on which of the
candidates have the largest Dirichlet regions in policy space?

The Dirichlet region (also known as the Voronoi polygon) for a candidate
is the set of points (potential voters in this case) that are closer (in
whatever metric) to that candidate than to any other candidate.

Alternately, you could randomly choose two of the three candidates with
the largest Dirichlet regions, to take into account that popularity is
determined by money, press, personality, etc. as much as by stance on the
issues.

If calculation of the Dirichlet regions is too time consuming, you could
take a random poll of the voters, and determine their responses by which
candidate they are the closest to.  If the poll sample is small, this
would throw in the random factor that we want, but bias it towards the
candidates with the largest Dirichlet regions.

Forest