[EM] election-for-sale typo

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

I've just noticed that I said that, in Myerson's election model
that I mentioned, the voter votes for the candidate who promises him
the most money.

What I should have said is that a candidate's utility to a voter
is the amount of money that s/he promises to that voter, and the
voter votes according to that and the strategy of the particular
method being tested.

One might first expect that Approval would cause candidates to promise
more to more voters, but maybe the reason why Approval does better
than IRV in that regard has to do with the fact the candidate only
has so much that he can distribute, and he can only assure so many
voters that he will give them more than the average of what the
other candidates will give them. He loses by spreading his bribes
so thinly that he isn't promising above that threshold.

In IRV, the candidate can concentrate all his promises on a few
people to whom he offers more than anyone else, or divide them
so thinly that lots of voters are promised 2nd-to-least by him.
The 2nd one doesn't sound promising. If a submajority group rank
him 1st, and everyone else has no use for him at all, that doesn't
sound like a winner either. Maybe his best strategy is inbetween,
and it doesn't sound unreasonable that it could turn out that that
strategy has him spreading his promises more thinly than he would
in Approval.

I emphasize that this is all speculation, and that I make no guarantee
that these statements are right. It's been a long time since I
saw the article.

As I said, Myerson found that Approval doesn't have the candidate
trying to please as many people as he does in IRV.

Mike Ossipoff


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