[EM] Re : Toy election model: 2D IQ (ideology/quality) model

[Juho Laatu]

On 9.11.2011, at 10.06, Jameson Quinn wrote:

> 2011/11/8 Kevin Venzke <stepjak at yahoo.fr>

> All that said, I would be interested to hear if someone has made an argument that majority rule, as a sensible principle, depends on some other more fundamental principle.
> 
> OK, here goes: utility is happiness and is the true goal. Majority rule is just the most strategy-proof principle which tends to agree with maximum utility. 

Here's another approach to justifying majority rule. The target is to achieve a stable state in a society that respects the one-man-one-vote principle. If we elect the Condorcet winner, then the society will be happy with that choice in the sense that there will always be a majority supporting that candidate against changing him to someone else. In the old days one-man-one-vote could have meant also one-man-one-veapon, meaning that there would be no mutiny. Today we may just think that even if some people do have stronger feelings than others, we should consider all of them to have equal strength.

I think both approaches (majority, utility) have their problems and paradoxes. There are different needs in different situations, and we could use different criteria in different elections / decision making situations.

Utility example:
- There are two alternatives. A) One person will lose $10000, others will not lose anything. B) All will lose some equal small amount, so that the sum of losses will be $10001. The point is that if we use utilities, let's not use the sum of utilities as the criterion.
- In the same way we might assume that in a situation where one person hates all the others, and all persons are candidates, we should not elect the person that hates all others although that might give us the highest sum of utilities.

These examples are just intended to demonstrate that there is no easy way out from the problems of both approaches. Different situations may benefit of different criteria. There is no single ideal and best method that should be used in all elections. Overall utility can be measured in many different ways (including also some majority oriented approaches).

Juho



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