[EM] "Be careful what you wish for"

[Araucaria Araucana]

One reason I went ahead and formulated the Marginal Ranked Approval
Voting page was to illustrate a method that is biased toward higher
approval.

        http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Marginal_Ranked_Approval_Voting

The problem with this method, when compared to DMC, is that it gives
higher-approved candidates too much of an advantage.  The long term
game theory effect of MRAV's bias toward higher-approved candidates is
that voters will give less approval to non-favorite candidates.

Forest made a comment a few weeks ago about an irritating former
contributor to the list, Donald Davidson:

   http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2002-February/007310.html

One of his statements (no longer on the web, apparently his web site
is gone) was he didn't care what method was used, it would eventually
evolve into IRV.

Well, that has a kernel of truth to it -- candidates are going to try
to game the system, whatever it is.  So whatever method you set up, it
needs to have a certain unpredictable aspect to it, even (or
especially) if it is deterministic, so voters will give up and simply
state their true preferences.

I set up the MRAV rules to emulate Approval Sorted Margins, but I
might try fiddling with the rules a bit to allow a strongly defeated
candidate to win.

Forest said something to this effect a couple of weeks back, when he
mentioned that he was toying with the idea of letting any candidate
with a beatpath to the Approval Winner be part of the random-ballot
lottery.

Ted
-- 
araucaria dot araucana at gmail dot com