[EM] RV comments

[Chris Benham]

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

>>At 07:20 AM 7/20/2007, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Say, for the moment, we disregard the fact that the SU claims 
>>>depend on sincere voting, and that sincere voting is nearly always 
>>>suboptimal in RV.
>>
>>
>>Ossipoff continually makes this claim. It's false. "Suboptimal" is 
>>the trick. It is suboptimal, true, from the point of view of the 
>>individual voter maximizing his or her own personal utility, *in some 
>>scenarios.* In others, it is clearly optimal to vote "sincerely."
>

Can we please have an example of one of these "other scenarios" that 
shows that Mike Ossipoff's
"claim  is false"?

I think Warren Schudy put it well in a  July 2007 draft paper:

"Range voting is a generalisation of approval voting where you can give 
each candidate any score
between 0 and 1. Optimal strategies never vote anything other than 0 or 
1, so range voting
complicates ballots and confuses voters for little or no gain."

>If I prefer A>B>C, and those are the only options, it's 
>clear that I optimize my expectation by voting A max, B min, but 
>where do I rate B? ...
>
>Where do I rate B? Well, if the B utility is midway between A and C, 
>we can define a "sincere" rating of B as 50%. If we have rated A max 
>and C min. However, that max and min rating is itself a full 
>disclosure of the utilities, the ratings have been normalized to the 
>election candidate set, causing loss of absolute utilities.
>
>It never hurts the voter personally to normalize in that way.
>

That is only true (probabilistically) if  both the "B utility" is 
*exactly* midway between A and C
and  also  (as far as  the  voter  knows)  both   A  and   C   are  
equally  likely   to  win.

It  is obvious that in practice the voter in Abd's example could be  
"hurt personally" by not voting
B max if  that causes C to win instead of B, or by not voting B min if  
that causes B to win instead
of  A.

Chris Benham






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