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

Simmons, Forest simmonfo at up.edu
Wed Aug 10 11:00:08 PDT 2005


Jobst gave examples in which optimal approval strategy for someone with preferences A>B>C>D would be to approve only A and C.  
 
Mike Ossipoff and Richard Moore first made me aware of these counterintuitive possibilities.  But I still believe that one would have to have impossibly precise and reliable probability and utility estimates before one would gain a significant advantage by skipping over B.  
 
Usually the probabilities and the utilities are crude subjective estimates.  However, in the case of repeated balloting, the probabilities get refined (if we can figure out how to do it!), and for the sake of idealization we can assume that the utilities are precise, too.  
 
If we can find a repeated balloting method that take these refinements into account, then great, but if it is only tractable to forget the tie probabilites and use the simpler "cutoff" style strategies, then no big loss.
 
Forest
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