[EM] Quick and Clean Burial Resistant Smith

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 07.01.2022 07:05, Forest Simmons wrote:
> Most designers of Condorcet methods asume that the gentlemanly thing to
> do is to give the votes a benefit of a doubt and assume that they must
> have voted sincerely but cycles are a result of errores of judgement. 
> 
> Because of these assumptions they attempt to filter out the erroneous
> preferences statistically 
> .. the main heuristic is that larger majorities are less apt to hold
> erroneous opinions than smaller ones ... hence cycles are broken by
> annulling the defeats with the smallest majorities.

There is probably a tradeoff between strategic resistance and honest
VSE. The more you want one, the less you get the other, and at the
extremes you completely disregard one or the other.

So if we could construct methods to spec, the best approach would be to
somehow infer just how much strategy the method needs to resist, and
then maximize VSE in a suitable model (probably spatial) subject to this
constraint.

But we don't really know how strong the barrier has to be against
strategy. As I've mentioned before, I think it differs based on culture:
IIRC Ireland saw much less vote management under STV than did New York.

If we only have one shot, it's reasonable to err on the side of strategy
resistance. That's not to say that the honesty-favoring methods don't
have their place, though: Debian seems to do pretty well with Schulze,
for instance.

As for methods like Plurality and (probably) IRV -- well, they're just
Pareto-dominated. You can find methods with better VSE and the same
level of strategic resistance, or methods that handle strategy better
while providing the same VSE.

-km