[EM] SODA strategy

Jameson Quinn jameson.quinn at gmail.com
Tue Aug 9 06:14:59 PDT 2011


SODA is not strategy free. Even if you make the assumption that candidate
preferences are honest because dishonesty will be detected and punished by
voters -- an assumption which puts the system beyond the reach of the
Gibbard-Satterthwaite proof -- the fact remains that you can construct
strategic scenarios.

However, it seems to me that SODA is not just a less-strategic system than
most others, but radically so. Unlike Approval, semi-honest approval
strategy is not something voters must deal with at least implicitly. But
like approval, non-semi-honest strategy is relegated to a tiny minority of
voters in a tiny minority of cases. The system can deal with all the
commonly-discussed strategic problems, including chicken, center squeeze,
and honest cycle. I honestly suspect that strategy under SODA would be
favored less than half as often as any other good deterministic system I
know of, including Approval, Asset, Condorcet (various), IRV, Median, and
Range.

So, how would you set out to make this idea demonstrable or falsifiable?
What rigorous statement about strategy and SODA could I make that would be
testable, preferably using simulated elections or mathematical
demonstration/counterexamples? What voter model could capture enough of the
sophisticated strategic thinking of which humans are capable?

How about "SODA requires no self-reinforcing or defensive strategy"?

These are honest, not rhetorical questions. I appreciate good responses,
good research questions, from anyone, whatever you expect that the results
of that research would be.

Thanks,
JQ
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