[EM] Auctions

[Raph Frank]

On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 7:53 AM, Greg Nisbet <gregory.nisbet at gmail.com> wrote:
> Voting by auction-- morally repugnant but strategy free!

Why?

In any case, the Clarke tax method has serious issues, but in
principle, you give each option on honest utility rating.

> The simple, humble Clarke tax method does seem a bituh unfair to me.
> There are various ways to remedy this problem like having it be based
> on the log of your income or making it based on how much income you
> have left as a means of judging how much you have contributed. There
> is a near endless number of ways to tweak this in order to amount to
> something useful.

The big issue is that according to economic theory, nobody would vote.
 If someone is in a polling booth, they have already ignored economic
theory and thus there is no way they are going to care about a tiny
probability of paying.


> Or
> instead of elimination for overvoting, you could use some other method
> of reallocation, the point is simple:

What's an overvote?  Do you mean people who bid more than they have?

> auction-type methods rely on weakening overvotes rather than the more
> traditional elect one candidate and then punish the supporters.
>
> As a starting point, let me explain what I mean by Naive Auction Range
> before before proposing more complicated methods. Here is how it
> works.
>
> 1) Voters fill out a range ballot. An ordinary Range ballot
>
> 2) The Naive Range winners are calculated.
>
> 3) you go back and eliminate any ballots that have voted more than
> whatever the individual maximum score was (in this case 99)
>
> 4) go to 2

That is an endless loop, I assume you mean:

1) Voters fill out a range ballot. An ordinary Range ballot

2) eliminate any ballots that have voted more than
whatever the individual maximum score was (in this case 99)

3) The Naive Range winners are calculated.

> instead of eliminating overvoting ballots, change their weight such
> that they are no longer overvoting.

Right, another option is to make it impossible to overvote.  If there
is space only for 2 digits, then you can't overvote.

> You could make arule that once it gets to one tenth or some arbitrary
> number it is no longer counted to prevent infinite loops.

Huh?

>
> You could also make an "eliinated" ballot simply become a Cumulative
> Vote ballot instead.


Huh again :).

> To my knowledge, acution type iteration hasn't really been discussed.
>
> Disclaimer: it is about 1 AM and I ate way too much candy. I also
> didn't look very hard for previous mentions of a similar topic.