[EM] "Intutive Loser Criterion" ?, SEC

[Chris Benham]

Jobst,
At the end of  a  Wed.Oct.6  message entitled  "River method - updated 
summary" you wrote:

>To do list
>----------
>
>- Do some spacial simulations
>- Find more criteria that distinguish between River, Ranked Pairs, and
>Beatpath
>- Test for the "Intuitive Loser Criterion", the "Sincere Expectation
>Criterion", and the "1st Choice Criterion"
>

CB: What  is the definition of  the  "Intuitive Loser Criterion"?   Is 
this one of your little jokes?

The  "Sincere Expectation Criterion"  was coined by  Blake Cretney  in 
the  Margins versus Winning Votes debate,
and applies when there are as few as three candidates (when River, 
Ranked Pairs, Beat Path and MinMax are unanimous).
SEC is met by Margins  but not  Winning Votes (which is the version of 
 River that you advocate.)

The  "1st. Choice Criterion" I gather is  what  Mike Ossipoff  used  to 
call the  Weak Favourite Betrayal Criterion, and  that
was mostly an issue on the other side of the same debate.

Chris Benham

Sincere Expectation Standard
Given that a voter has no knowledge about how others will vote, a
sincere vote must be at least as likely as any insincere vote to
give results that are in some way better in the eyes of the voter.

Or expressed as a more rigid criterion:
-----
Sincere Expectation Criterion (SEC)
Consider a voter with a preference order between the possible
outcomes of the election.  Let us call his sincere ballot, X.  Now,
assuming that every possible legal ballot is equally likely for every
other voter, there must be some justification for the vote X over any
other way to fill out the ballot, which I will call Y.
This justification is given by the following comparisons:

The probability of X electing one of the voter's first choices vs.
the probability of Y electing one of these choices

The probability of X electing one of the voter's first or second
choices vs. the probability of Y electing one of these.

The probability of X electing one of the voter's first, second or
third choices vs. the probability of Y electing one of these.
... And so on through all the voter's choices

X must either do better in one of these comparisons than Y, or equal
in all.  Otherwise the sincere vote can not be justified.
----
In other words, there must be some justification for voting sincerely
even if the voter does not know how any one else is voting.