[EM] Re: Utilities?

[James Green-Armytage]

Jobst Heitzig <heitzig-j at web.de> writes:
>And we *must* *not* assume that
>preferences are *acyclic* as long as there is evidence that people can
>have cyclic preferences. 

	Why are you so adamant about this point? In what situation do you think
cyclic individual preferences would be important and meaningful enough to
be worth paying attention to? You make it sound like a matter of life and
death or something, for a voter to be able to express preferences such as
(A>B, B>C, C>A). In what situation would this have any major practical
benefit?

	By the way, if you don't want to look seriously at weighted pairwise
because ratings are incompatible with cyclic preferences, I might as well
point out that you can put a few candidates in a cycle with each other as
long as you give all of them the same rating, and it wouldn't be a total
contradiction with the WP method. I personally don't see it as a good
idea, but it is a possible variation.

James