[EM] Thoughts on Burial

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Jameson Quinn wrote:

> I've been thinking recently about systems which enforce chiral symmetry, 
> making condorcet ties impossible. While it is possible to "solve" the 
> truncation/burial problem (eg, between two near-clones who split a weak 
> majority) in this way, I have not been able to come up with an 
> acceptably simple system. The closest I know of is "tournament 
> seeding"-style, condorcet-compliant (though not necessarily 
> condorcet-based) systems, where only certain pairwise races are 
> considered. In such systems, burial/truncation is a nonstrategy, period.

I think I read somewhere that elimination tournament methods must fail 
monotonicity. I do know that runoff-type elimination based on weighted 
positional methods (e.g. IRV being based on Plurality, and 
Borda-elimination being based on Borda) must fail monotonicity.

Possible monotone methods might be based around Bucklin-type counts, or 
perhaps something as simple as Smith,Plurality (not very good in 
practice) or Smith,Approval.

There's also "first preference Copeland" (each candidate has penalty 
equal to the number of times those that beat it pairwise appear in top 
rank), BPW (if there is a cycle, elect the candidate that beats the 
Plurality winner by the greatest amount), and Smith,IRV, but while 
resistant to burial strategy, none of these methods are monotone.