[EM] Range Voting Strategy

[Chris Benham]

Warren Smith wrote:

> Kevin Venzke posted some news about range voting strategy.
> I have now written considerably more extensive simulator than his
> (but inspired by his) and the results are interesting.
>    Somewhat contrary to what Venzke seemed to be concluding,
> my conclusion is that "honest" range voting (scaled
> so you score the best candiate the max, the worst the min,
> and the rest linearly interpolated)  is an impressively
> good voting strategy in the random voter zero info statistical setting.
>   http://rangevoting.org/RVstrat3.html
>
> wds
> ----
>
>  
>
> C. Scaled sincerity. Voter linearly transforms utilities to make best 
> have rescaled utility 1,
> worst 0, and rest linearly interpolated, then uses that as her vote
>
> E  Mean-based thresholding. The voter gives max to every candidate at 
> least as good as
> the average value of all candidates, and gives min to the others



This doesn't surprise me very much. How does the number of slots on the 
ratings ballot
(the granularity of the Range ballot) affect this? Since E is the best 
strategy with more than
about 10 voters, and with Approval these two strategies are the same, 
does that mean that
from this point of view the fewer the better?  Then is Half-Approval 
(Range 3) better in this
respect than Range 100?

One slightly interesting approval strategy you didn't list: "approve all 
candidates preferred to
all the candidates below the biggest sincere ratings gap between any two 
consecutively ranked
candidates".  I think it takes more than three candidates for this to 
differ from E.

Chris Benham
















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