[Election-Methods] utility theory lesson for a very confused rob brown

[daniel radetsky]

On Jan 10, 2008 8:39 PM, CLAY SHENTRUP <clay at electopia.org> wrote:

> Your initial point was about risk aversion, so that's what I discussed.
> If the question is specifically how we measure utility, then I'm happy to
> talk about that.
>

I suggest we fork the thread for this purpose. My current position is that
utility cannot be measured behaviorally.

There are voting methods based on money, but they (falsely) treat money as
> being equal to utility.  See CTT voting for instance:
>

>From my reading of the article, CTT does not identify money with utility,
but merely says that involving money gives people an incentive to accurately
report their utilities. I think this is true, as far as it goes.

For elections it's better to just try to measure people's behavior toward
> candidates, not money.
>

My intuition is that you are right, although I am unsure as to what
justifies this.


> That is, given the opportunity to rate 3 candidates, what will you do?
>

A barrel roll (see what I did there?)
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