[EM] simulating an Approval campaign/election

[James Green-Armytage]

What kind of preference profiles are you using for your simulation? Are
you defining voter preferences by ordinal ranking? Are the rankings
entirely random, or are they built around certain patterns, e.g. issue
space, or some other type of 'closeness' of one candidate to another? I'd
encourage you to increase the number of candidates when possible. I
imagine that this will decrease the probability of convergence. However,
it's possible that some non-convergent situations could be more troubling
than others. For example, in a ten candidate situation, if it ends up
oscillating between two candidates who are relatively similar to one
another, there may be some amount of stability in this even though the
outcome is non-convergent. I agree with you, though, that we would like to
see convergent outcomes given stable preference profiles, and I think that
it is interesting to try to figure out which methods do the best job of
providing this. I'd ask you for the code, but I'm afraid I don't know
anything about computer programming.

my best,
James