[EM] another CR/Approval method

[Kevin Venzke]

Forest,

 --- Forest Simmons <fsimmons at pcc.edu> a écrit : 
> I like it!
> 
> As far as I know this method is original with Kevin.

Both good to hear.  Hopefully you won't have to take back either of those.

I wonder if a better name can be devised for it.  The notion of "gradual info
approval" isn't so novel, and isn't very particular to this method.

About your MMPO idea:

> Find the two candidates whose max opposition is least.
> 
> On each ballot that contributes to the max opposition of both of these
> candidates, merge the top two levels.
> 
> Recalculate the max oppositions of all the candidates to find the new
> front runners.

(I assume first of all that opposition is measured in terms of the number
of voters, not in terms of the total rating difference on all ballots.)

It's interesting to me that the method seems unlikely to alter the MMPO scores
of the original front-runners.  It seems it would pick new front-runners only
because someone else's score went down far enough.  It also seems that those
new front-runners would be likely to have been ranked near the top, along with
their "opposition candidate."  Is that a deliberate effort to make Favorite
less likely to sink Second-Favorite?

It also seems that the method would preserve MMPO's rewarding of randomly
filling out the lower equal preferences, with truncation never being a good
idea.

I was reading the archives yesterday, some long exchange between Mike Ossipoff
and Craig Carey about Approval and Borda, primarily.  Someone else mentioned
something about how Saari thought truncation should work in Borda.  For the
ranking A>B=C, it seems Saari recommended a single point for A, whereas the
more common method would give 2 points to A and .5 each to B and C.  Someone
pointed out that if the voters randomly filled out their equal preferences,
they could achieve the latter point scale on average, even under Saari's rule.

I say all this, wondering whether a good truncation rule could be devised for
MinMax (Pairwise Opposition).  It couldn't be as simple, though.  I wonder if
a fair, effective rule might require that the method be non-summable.


Kevin Venzke
stepjak at yahoo.fr


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