[EM] request for reading matter

[John B. Hodges]

I confess I am not so fluent in math as many here seem to be; though 
I once held my own studying graduate-level economic theory, that was 
20 years ago. My "comparative advantage" has been translating back 
into English, so I do not get lost in the abstractions as some 
theorists do.

Saari's critique of Approval (and some other systems) as being 
indeterminate translates into the point that you cannot determine the 
outcome solely from knowing the voters' ordinal preference rankings. 
To predict a result, you have to know the rankings AND what strategy 
the voters will use. Approval gives voters a wide range of possible 
strategies, so it is more indeterminate than most. The argument loses 
its force if there are simple strategies that generate good results. 
I'm satisfied that there are such strategies for Approval. My 
remaining concerns are about what results could be expected if some 
fraction of voters were sufficiently ignorant and confused that they 
did not know even those simple strategies.
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John B. Hodges, jbhodges@  @usit.net
Do Justice, Love Mercy, and Be Irreverent.