[EM] Efforts to improve on CR's strategy

[Bart Ingles]

Ken Johnson wrote:
> 
> I was, until recently, a fanatical advocate of Approval. I tried to
> demonstrate by empirical simulation the superiority of Approval over
> rank methods, based on the criterion that the election method should
> maximize "social utility" as defined by sincere CR. (See my earlier post
> in Election-methods digest, Vol 1 #597, Message 4.) Unfortunately, it
> didn't turn out the way I expected. In a single-issue election with many
> candidates, Approval exhibited abysmal performance, worse than all other
> methods (including Plurality). So I gave up my crusade. Oh well.


I have no idea how to locate "Vol 1 #597", so I don't know what Ken
means by "exhibited abysmal performance".  Was this a series of
simulations?  A single example?

In Merrill's 'Monte Carlo' simulations, approval voting did pretty well
in terms of social utility-- better than all other methods in the
three-candidate case, and only marginally worse than Condorcet and Borda
with four or more candidates.

Bart