[EM] Book- Evaluation and Optimization of Electoral Systems

[Joe Weinstein]

Several months ago a posting of mine noted and briefly critiqued this book.  
For brevity, I called it 'The Italian Job' (IJ).

IJ's approaches to taxonomy of electoral system are formalistic and 
unwieldy, but not really systematic - a real disappointment, given the 
book's professional math society sponsorship.

IJ's agreeably thorough discussion of apportionment methods aptly treats 
them as solutions to an 'optimal' allocation problem, with  different 
methods corresponding to different criteria of optimality.  (However, one 
would expect optimality criteria to be related to and even derived from 
notions of 'utility'.  Maybe I had a case of dyslexia, but I couldn't find 
any such relationship mentioned, let alone exploited.)

Joe Weinstein
Long Beach, CA USA

----Original Message Follows----
From: DEMOREP1 at aol.com
Reply-To: election-methods-list at eskimo.com
To: election-methods-list at eskimo.com
Subject: [EM] Book- Evaluation and Optimization of Electoral Systems
Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2002 11:33:06 EST

 >From another list-- a book--

Evaluation and Optimization of Electoral Systems
Editor Pietro Grilli di Cortona
Publisher - SIAM/Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
February 1999
 >From the series "SIAM Monographs on Discrete Mathematics and Applications"
ISBN 0898714222
US$63.00
SIAM description: "systematic quantitative approach to the analysis,
evaluation and design of electoral systems."







_________________________________________________________________
Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. 
http://www.hotmail.com