[EM] Strategy and Bayesian Regret

Kevin Venzke stepjak at yahoo.fr
Fri Oct 28 09:24:58 PDT 2011


Hi Jameson,
 
I am a little short on time, to read this as carefully as I would like, but if you have a
moment to answer in the meantime:

--- En date de : Ven 28.10.11, Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com> a écrit :
voting is best. But how do you deal with strategy? Figuring out what strategies are sensible is the relatively easy part; whether it's first-order rational strategies (as James Green-Armytage has worked out) or n-order strategies under uncertainty (as Kevin Venzke does) 
 
3. Try to use some rational or cognitive model of voters to figure out how much strategy real people will use under each method. This is hard work and involves a lot of assumptions, but it's probably the best we can do today.
 

As you might have guessed, I'm arguing here for method 3. Kevin Venzke has done work in this direction, but his assumptions --- that voters will look for first-order strategies in an environment of highly volatile polling data --- while very useful for making a computable model, are still obviously unrealistic.
 
[end quotes]
 
I am very curious if you could elaborate on my assumption that voters will "look for
first-order strategies in an environment of highly volatile polling data." I'm not totally
sure what you mean by first-order vs. n-order strategies, and whether your criticism
of unrealism is based on "voters will look for..." part or on the "highly volatile polling 
data" part. I wonder if this volatility is a matter of degree or a general question of 
approach.
 
I want to note in case it's not clear that when I talk about what strategies voters are
using, that is just a reporting mechanism that has awareness of the relationship
between voters' sincere preferences and how they actually voted. The voters have
no idea what they are doing in strategic or sincere terms.
 
Thanks.
 
Kevin
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