[EM] Why care about later-no-harm or prohibiting candidate burial?

[Jonathan Lundell]

On Feb 21, 2011, at 4:06 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> 
> There might also be a trade-off. If you have a certain election where a candidate wins, that election might be made up of honest ballots (in which case it's good that the candidate wins), or of strategic ballots (in which a metod that resists strategy should elect another candidate); but the method can't know which is the case because all it's got are the ballots themselves, free of any context. Looking at the structure of election methods may let us know more about where that trade-off actually resides, though, or in simpler terms: how strategy-resistant a method can be and still be a good method.

On a related note, one of the problems with burial-prone methods is that burial is a simple, intuitive and attractive strategy that can be easily employed by relatively naive voters. It's a perverse incentive precisely because of KM's point above: the method is faced with an unknown mix of sincere and strategic ballots. GIGO.

By contrast, non-monotonicity is relatively benign (in this sense), in that it's very hard for a voter to come up with a practical voting strategy to take advantage of it. Among other things, voters don't have enough information about the detailed preferences (and strategies) of the other voters to successfully strategize themselves; there's little to be gained by voting other than sincerely.