[EM] another reason to avoid strategic motivations

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Jonathan Lundell wrote:
> ...or at least to avoid methods that encourage strategic voting, is that 
> voters are so bad at it.
> 
> I blogged a rather dismaying study the other day on the subject of 
> people's tendency to irrationally misjudge probabilities when they have 
> a stake in the outcome. I wouldn't want to draw too close a parallel 
> between this and any particular election method. Rather, it's something 
> to keep in mind when we talk about voters trying to make strategic 
> calculations that they're not really competent, in general, to make.
> 
> Notice also that there's a systematic bias; it's not just that the 
> subjects are wrong in a random way that might tend to cancel out.

Maybe this means that for strategies where people are required to 
cooperate for it to have any effect, the voters will be less likely to 
attempt it, judging (if incorrectly) that few others are going to. I'm 
thinking of strategies like collective burial in Condorcet methods.

On another note, Abd says the only method that got better Bayesian 
Regret scores than Range, among those Warren has tested, is Range + top 
two runoff. To my knowledge, that's not true, as Warren says a DSV 
variant of Range got better scores than Range itself (according to this 
post: 
http://listas.apesol.org/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2005-October/017331.html 
). Again, this suggests that if you absolutely have to have a method 
where strategy is required to get it to work, use a computer to do the 
strategy since it'll be much better at it than the voters will. What you 
say only reinforces this point.