[EM] Strategic Voting and SImulating it.

Greg Nisbet gregory.nisbet at gmail.com
Sun Oct 12 12:39:57 PDT 2008


Thoughts on Strategy:

Voting strategy is susceptible to the Tinkerbell effect. Certain conditions
only exist because voters or their programmers "believe" them to.

Coming up with voter strategy piecemeal is not methodical enough. I propose
a fairly reasonable alternative to this. I call it Vote By Result.

I have a general purpose strategy idea.

Divide the voters into particular groups that vote early to late.

The earliest group would presumably vote honest (I recommend making it small
to minimize the impact of "false honesty")

The others would abandon their true favorite if they lacked the power to
independently make it reality.

Essentially after each group goes the results-so-far are updated.

Then each pseudovoter* in the new group votes.

The process continues

*  a pseudovoter is like a block of voters, but its vote is given more
weight  than an individual voter and agrees with itself completely so that
voters in later generations can counteract the "momentum" of previous
results. The result of this experiment would be fairly simple. The voters
would end up using simple strategy. Later pseudovoters would abandon their
true favorite if they do not possess the power to independently alter
results and instead to default to the best electable alternative.

I have no idea how the weight/number of pseudovoters should grow with
"time".

I suggest geometrically growing pseudovoter weights and a constant
population size.

This method is computationally intensive, so beware. Probably not as
intensive as generating theorems proving some strategy optimal for some
voting method however : - ).
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