[EM] new book about voting methods

[James Green-Armytage]

Dear election methods fans,

	Nicolaus Tideman has recently written an academic book about voting
methods, which is entitled "Collective Decisions and Voting". I think that
it's a great book, but I don't think that it's going to be marketed in any
serious way, so its success will depend largely on people who already care
about the subject matter. Hence this post.
	This book covers a lot of the material that is discussed on this list; in
my opinion it does so to a much greater extent than any previously
published book. (Compare, for example, with Dennis Mueller's enormous
public choice bible, which recognizes the Condorcet criterion, but seems
unaware of the possibility of actual Condorcet-efficient voting systems.)
The book includes analysis of the several voting methods, including (but
not limited to) the beatpath/Schulze method, approval voting, the
alternative vote/IRV, ranked pairs (of course, because Tideman first
proposed it), range voting, Borda, Kemeny, Dodgson, Nanson, Bucklin,
Black, minimax, cardinal pairwise, block voting, cumulative voting, party
list PR, plus an in-depth discussion of different forms of STV. 
	There is an in-depth chapter on Condorcet cycles, a chapter on the Arrow
theorem that you are likely to find surprising, a chapter on the
Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, and a chapter on evaluative criteria (e.g.
majority, mutual majority, Smith, Schwartz, monotonicity, independence of
clones, etc.) 
	There are also topics less native to this list, such as Edward Clarke's
"demand-revealing process" and other mechanisms that seek to measure
intensity of voter preferences, plus a philosophical framework that
locates voting within the context of collective decisions in general. 
	I believe that the book will become available in late December. It is
admittedly rather expensive, but I'm told that a discount will be
available for online orders from the publisher.

Here is the book's page on the publisher's web site: (the publisher is
Ashgate)
http://tinyurl.com/shvwc
Here is the book's page on amazon:
http://tinyurl.com/y3cuhp
I also have a flyer for the book. I'll temporarily put this on my web site
at:
http://fc.antioch.edu/~james_green-armytage/x/cdvflyer.pdf

my best,
James Green-Armytage