[Election-Methods] RE : Is "sincere" voting in Range suboptimal?

[Kevin Venzke]

Hi,

--- Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd at lomaxdesign.com> a écrit :
> At 10:00 AM 7/25/2007, Kevin Venzke wrote:
> >Just to be clear, by "moot vote" you mean the case where the observed
> >voter fails to have an effect on the result, correct?
> 
> Actually, no, but close. They are all the cases where the voter's 
> vote doesn't matter, no matter how the voter votes. The voter's vote 
> may still fail to have an effect on the outcome if the voter votes in 
> certain ways, but these are all the cases where the voter's decision 
> has consequences for the utility of the election, as seen by the voter.

Ok. So if I were to modify my simulation to ignore trials where no pair
of preexisting vote totals are at least as close as the maximum score
from one vote, would you be interested in these results?

> >The trouble with excluding these trials is that it is important to
> >consider how often votes are moot given various ways of voting. If it
> >didn't matter then it would probably be adequate to consider only
> single-
> >voter elections.
> 
> That may be of interest. But that is a separate measure, one which I 
> have not studied, and I'm not clear that it is at all relevant to the 
> comparison before us. Proportionally, offhand, it looks to me as if 
> the voter's vote is not moot in the same percentage of cases for 
> Range or Approval.

That seems true, however the mere fact that your vote isn't moot in
some situation isn't something you can take to the bank. For instance just
because it turns out to be possible for you to break an A-B tie by voting A
10 and B 0, doesn't mean you are actually free to do it; you cast your
vote without this knowledge.

> >However, in my simulations no assumptions were made about the other
> >voters. Only preexisting total scores were generated, which could have
> >arisen from any strategy.
> 
> But in another post, I point out that by looking at overall utility, 
> rather than the utility of only those votes where the voter's vote 
> can make a difference, a great deal of precision is lost. Given 
> sufficient precision, the two methods should coincide, but it is much 
> more difficult to maintain the high precision necessary with the 
> method used by Venzke.

I don't think I understand your concern about precision. Yes, there are
extremely few scenarios where one voter can make any difference. One
simply runs enough trials to allow the final averages to settle somewhere.
I write my simulations so that I can see the average move as trials are
run, like a ball spun down a funnel.

> Further, Venske is not testing Range 2, but higher-resolution Range. 
> Approval *is* a Range method. What is the optimum Range *method* in 
> terms of maximizing voter expected utility with the best strategy? Is 
> it Approval -- this is what is being claimed by some, but without 
> comparing Approval to Range N, other than a high value of N. To my 
> knowledge, my study is the first to look at Range 2 in this way. And 
> it appears that Range 2 beats Approval.

I'm not sure what you mean by Range 2. Yes, I assumed the voter could
use as much resolution as he wanted. But if voting approval style is
optimal in large elections, I don't see how it matters how much resolution
was actually allowed.

> So the new question for those interested, with the time, is, For 
> Range N, what value of N maximizes the power of the voter to maximize 
> personal utility? From my results, N is not 1. Nor is it, apparently, 
> 999, if that is what was used in the simulations. It is probably 
> somewhere in between, and I predict that it will be a relatively low 
> number, it is not impossible that Range utility starts to decline 
> above 2. But that is only speculation at this time.

My simulation used several orders of magnitude more than 999 slots if
that is what you mean.

Why do you say that apparently 999 is not the value of N which "maximizes
the power of the voter to maximize personal utility"?

Kevin Venzke


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