[EM] Efforts to improve on CR's strategy

[Brian Olson]

On May 20, 2004, at 4:46 PM, Ken Johnson wrote:

>> Date: Wed, 19 May 2004 23:24:29 -0700
>> From: Bart Ingles <bartman at netgate.net>
>>
>> ...  In your 10 candidate, 1 issue trial, are you able to account
>> for why sincere CR, exaggerated CR, Condorcet, Borda, IRV, and 
>> Plurality
>> all yield exactly the same average across 100,000 elections?  It looks
>> like top-two Runoff is within 0.1% of the same score.
>>
> I think it's simply the case that with 1 issue, all voters' CR 
> profiles are precisely correlated (i.e., any two profiles differ only 
> by a multiplicative scale factor), so all these methods become 
> equivalent.

This doesn't make sense to me. If a voter has a random preferred stand 
on an issue, and a candidate has a random position on an issue, then 
every voter should have a different opinions of the candidates.

In my simulation I skipped the "issue" problem and designed voters to 
have direct utility for each choice. It was a uniform distribution, 
perhaps a normal distribution would have better simulated a multitude 
of issues combined in subtle ways.

Here's what I get for a similar test configuration:
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I suppose it's similar overall, but I think I see more variation in the 
primary statistic "Average Happiness", which makes me wonder if there's 
some artifact in your simulator.

Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/