[EM] Cooperative voting

[Andy Jennings]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 3:52 PM, Kevin Venzke <stepjak at yahoo.fr> wrote:

> From the perspective of a sincere voter, the "approval" option signifies
> conditioning their opinion of a candidate on how that candidate's
> supporters vote. It's not such a crazy idea if one doesn't know much about
> a given candidate. I wonder if more can be done with the concept.
>
> My main concern with this type of method is the situation that a bloc of
> voters (supporting candidate A let's say) "defects" because they don't
> actually like candidate B. Even if B supporters know this is the situation,
> and even if B supporters would be willing to support A anyway, they don't
> have a (sincere) way of doing this.
>


You could have people mark their favorite in one column, mark everyone they
unconditionally approve in a second column, and mark everyone they
conditionally approve in a third column.  It seems like that creates more
incentives for "chicken", where A's supporters say, "we're not going to
approve B at all, so you'd better unconditionally approve A or someone else
will win."  I'm trying to decide if that's worse than the original system.
In the original system they could say, "we're not going to conditionally
approve B, so you'd better just put A as your favorite or someone else will
win."

We could combine the first two columns, so they just marked everyone they
unconditionally approve in one column and mark everyone they conditionally
approve in another column.  Then the ballot is similar to other "3-grade"
systems like MCA.  What does conditional approval mean, in that case?  Is
my approval activated when someone is found who approves ANY of my
favorites?  When someone approves ALL of my favorites?  Or it is
fractionally activated depending on what fraction of my favorites they
approve?  (I'm not sure if any of these play nicely with reciprocity.  I'll
have to think about it...)
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