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Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:<br>
<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid20070720191912.146D5189F80@swarthymail-mx1.g.dreamhost.com"
type="cite">
<pre wrap=""><blockquote type="cite"><pre wrap="">At 07:20 AM 7/20/2007, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite"><pre wrap=""> Say, for the moment, we disregard the fact that the SU claims
depend on sincere voting, and that sincere voting is nearly always
suboptimal in RV.
</pre></blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
Ossipoff continually makes this claim. It's false. "Suboptimal" is
the trick. It is suboptimal, true, from the point of view of the
individual voter maximizing his or her own personal utility, *in some
scenarios.* In others, it is clearly optimal to vote "sincerely."</pre></blockquote></pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
Can we please have an example of one of these "other scenarios" that
shows that Mike Ossipoff's<br>
"claim is false"? <br>
<br>
I think Warren Schudy put it well in a July 2007 draft paper:<br>
<br>
"Range voting is a generalisation of approval voting where you can give
each candidate any score<br>
between 0 and 1. Optimal strategies never vote anything other than 0 or
1, so range voting <br>
complicates ballots and confuses voters for little or no gain."<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">If I prefer A>B>C, and those are the only options, it's
clear that I optimize my expectation by voting A max, B min, but
where do I rate B? ...</pre>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Where do I rate B? Well, if the B utility is midway between A and C,
we can define a "sincere" rating of B as 50%. If we have rated A max
and C min. However, that max and min rating is itself a full
disclosure of the utilities, the ratings have been normalized to the
election candidate set, causing loss of absolute utilities.
It never hurts the voter personally to normalize in that way.</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
That is only true (probabilistically) if both the "B utility" is
*exactly* midway between A and C <br>
and also (as far as the voter knows) both A and C are
equally likely to win. <br>
<br>
It is obvious that in practice the voter in Abd's example could be
"hurt personally" by not voting<br>
B max if that causes C to win instead of B, or by not voting B min if
that causes B to win instead<br>
of A.<br>
<br>
Chris Benham<br>
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