[EM] : Chicken problem (was: SODA and the Condorcet

[Jameson Quinn]

> I think the "explicit clone preprocessing of the votes + Condorcet"
> description that I gave below is a quite accurate definition of a method
> that both eliminates the clone problems and has rich ballots (rich enough to
> take position also on the order within the competing branch).
>

I still think you have to spell things out more for us. If the tree is
(((A,B),C),D) and I vote DBCA, what does my vote get corrected to? And I can
easily think of several variations of how to preprocess votes into clone
trees. In general, I think methods which try to infer structure from votes
are tricky. Either you're risking nonmonotonicity by reading in more than is
really there, or you could end up just reinventing a complicated way to
restate DSC/DAC.

Note that part of the SODA solution for the chicken dilemma -- that is, the
enforcably-mutual preferences between candidates -- is tree-like. So I can
see the potential advantages of trees, I just don't think it's fair to claim
benefits for a method that's not well-described enough for us to construct
pathologies.

JQ


ps. By the way, can anyone explain to me a scenario where DSC would be
better than DAC? I understand that with full rankings they're equivalent,
but I don't see when DSC is better.
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