[EM] Continuous bias

[Juho Laatu]

On 16.5.2011, at 15.49, Markus Schulze wrote:

> Hallo,
> 
> currently, there is the tradition to give 12, 10, 8 points
> always to its political/ethnic/geographic neighbours. I recommend
> that a Condorcet method should be used to reduce the effects of
> this voting behaviour. As Condorcet methods put less emphasis on
> first preferences, the above voting behaviour would be nivellated
> over all countries.
> 
> Markus Schulze

Yes, Condorcet methods might be good. Also Borda seems to be quite good in the Eurovision context since I have not heard of countries giving 0 points to good songs that are so good that they might threaten their victory of their favourite songs or their favourite countries (with bad songs). The usual Borda strategies are thus probably not used. Range style methods would be more problematic since all the points could be given to few favourites.

Condorcet and other ranking based methods may also be vulnerable to continuous bias. I was trying to find some defence also against one country always ranking some other country first. Similar factors could be counted and the weight of the pairwise preferences of the favoured countries (over others) could be reduced (I mentioned this shortly in the initial mail too).

The current method gives high points only to ten best songs. It thus emphasizes the impact of being among the few best songs. Condorcet could support also songs that all find acceptable but not spectacular (=among the top ten). I don't believe this difference would make a big impact anyway. Condorcet would be a good method for Eurovision. It would not eliminate the continuous bias problem very efficiently though. (And as already noted few times, there may not be any need to reduce that continuous bias in the Eurovision Song Contest in the first place.)

Condorcet counting process is a bit more difficult to follow than the Borda (or Range) counting process. That may make it a bit less fun in big real-time shows like the Eurovision Song Contest. (Note that votes needed to beat all the others could be a nice way to indicate the state of the vote calculation process to the real-time audience of millions of viewers. :-)

Juho