[EM] 28 years of progress and a wakeup call

[Closed Limelike Curves]

>
> I think the idea is somewhat like this. I haven't read the paper so I'm

not sure I got it or its preconditions right.

Your description gets some of the intuitions correct, but Myerson and Weber
don't assume perfect information; their model includes uncertainty in how
many voters there are of each type (i.e. turnout or polling errors). They
show approval voting 1. has a unique strategic equilibrium, i.e. only one
possible lottery is a result; and 2. that strategic equilibrium elects the
Condorcet winner.

 Or you could just run a Condorcet method and get the CW in one step

without all this poll business.
>


> Approval has very good method simplicity. But this process complexity --

sheesh, that's something else.

No, you can't; that's the point of Gibbard's theorem. It says that no
matter what method you use, you still have to read the polls, because
regardless of the voting system your best vote will depend on the
preferences of others. That's true regardless of the voting system.
Importantly, it's also true for 100% of elections, regardless of the
manipulability rate or voting rule, because you don't know whether you're
in a manipulable election until *after* you've checked the polls. So,
regardless of the method, you always have to check the polls.

The only ways to reduce the strategic burden of a method are to either A)
make strategy easy to work out or B) make the incentive for strategy so
small, and the difficulty of identifying the correct strategy so large,
that people will just never check the polls. I doubt B can be done, because
the number of candidates in real elections is small, and parties just have
*far* too strong an incentive to identify strategy. In Hong Kong, parties
will frequently execute *correlated randomized strategies *using apps or
instructions like "vote for the candidate whose height is closest to
yours".

Also, people tend to know who's leading in a race just by hearing news
coverage. I don't think it's possible to know enough about an election to
have an opinion on the candidates, but *still* have no idea who the
frontrunners are. If nothing else you'd need to know who they are so you
can learn their policy positions.

Before someone says "but Monroe" -- IRV passes his criterion and I see
> no reason why a Condorcet prefix should void it.
>
Condorcet//IRV passes his criterion, but I doubt it has a unique
equilibrium on the Condorcet winner because it's not weakly-sincere in the
Myerson-Weber equilibrium like score or approval are. It's entirely
possible you can't identify the sincere Condorcet winner from the polls.
Same reason the Condorcet winner can (and often does) lose under FPP with
strategic voting, even though the Condorcet winner is a strong Nash
equilibrium in FPP.

I agree. I find method complexity much more honest than process complexity.
>
> We also really need a way to talk about process complexity in a
> principled way. When a method is intended to be the base layer of an
> induced method, then the properties of the base method can obscure the
> properties of the induced method.
>
> E.g. if the iteration above settles into cycling between members of the
> essential set, then the induced method is nonmonotone, even if Approval
> itself is monotone. It is also nondeterministic[1] even if Approval isn't.
>
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