[EM] EM Paper Accepted for Publication

[Kevin Venzke]

Hi Forest,

--- En date de : Jeu 11.11.10, fsimmons at pcc.edu <fsimmons at pcc.edu> a écrit :
> To make a long story short, this challenge resulted in a
> paper entitled, “Some Chance for Consensus,” 
> that Jobst and I submitted to the Journal of Social Choice
> and Welfare about a year ago. 
> 
> After a lengthy peer review process it has been accepted
> for publication.
> 
> http://www.pik-potsdam.de/members/heitzig/some-chance-for-consensus

Congratulations. It's an interesting paper.

One amusing possibility that occurs to me is that, when consensus fails
to be reached and the outcome is determined randomly, the outcome could
be so objectionable that most voters wish to have the vote again, even
if that outcome (and even the outcome of the vote on whether to have a
second vote) will also be determined randomly. I suppose with enough
rounds of voting you would eventually probably (merely probably!) find an
outcome that nobody wants to contest anymore.

This makes me think that this method is better suited to votes that by
law are taken periodically, or according to the request of someone other
than the voters themselves.

I suppose that for public elections you can make this method much simpler,
and lose some of its positive properties while making it more politically
acceptable.

For example, suppose we use MCA (or even just approval) ballots, and will
resort to a random procedure if we can't find majority (or perhaps 60%)
approval. The random procedure could be limited to selecting candidates
who obtained some threshold of votes.

Another idea I've had is to reward a constituency with a second seat if
they succeed in finding sufficient consensus when filling the first one.

Kevin