[EM] RE: 0-info approval voting, repeated polling, and adjusting priors

[Simmons, Forest]

Thanks to one and all (in both private and public communications) for the creative small group ideas,
 
Jobst asked about repeated approval polling ideas that might converge.
 
Here's an approach that I would like to see explored more:
 
Any method (like DFC) for constructing a lottery from ballots with approval cutoffs could be iterated as follows.
 
The voter indicated approval cutoffs could be considered as nominal or tentative cutoffs.
 
After the lottery is constructed, new cutoffs could be determined from the lottery probabilities.
 
At each successive stage we would base the new lottery calculation on a weighted average of all the old cutoffs.  In other words, the cutoff on each ballot is adjusted slightly towards the most recent lottery expected value before calculating the new lottery probabilities.
 
If the cutoff values converge, then the lotteries converge to the winning lottery.
 
If folks are leery of lotteries, then one last approval poll based on the limiting lottery probabilities would determine the winner.
 
Forest

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