<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2011/10/28 Kevin Venzke <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:stepjak@yahoo.fr">stepjak@yahoo.fr</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" style="font:inherit"><div>Hi Jameson,</div>
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<div>I am a little short on time, to read this as carefully as I would like, but if you have a</div>
<div>moment to answer in the meantime:<br><br>--- En date de : <b>Ven 28.10.11, Jameson Quinn <i><<a href="mailto:jameson.quinn@gmail.com" target="_blank">jameson.quinn@gmail.com</a>></i></b> a écrit :<div class="im">
<br>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 <a href="http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~armytage/svn2010.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">James Green-Armytage has worked out</a>) or n-order strategies under uncertainty (as Kevin Venzke does) </div>
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<div>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.</div>
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<div>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.</div>
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<div>I am very curious if you could elaborate on my assumption that voters will "look for</div>
<div>first-order strategies in an environment of highly volatile polling data." I'm not totally</div>
<div>sure what you mean by first-order vs. n-order strategies, </div></td></tr></tbody></table></blockquote><div><br></div><div>First-order strategies are strategies which work assuming all other factions' votes are unchanged. Second-order strategies either respond to, or defend against, first-order strategies. I guess that your system, through iterated polling, deals with "respond to", but it is incapable of "defend against".</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" style="font:inherit"><div>and whether your criticism</div>
<div>of unrealism is based on "voters will look for..." part or on the "highly volatile polling </div>
<div>data" part.</div></td></tr></tbody></table></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Some of the former (lack of defense), but mostly the latter. </div><div><br></div><div>Also, it's not so much a criticism, as a pointer for what comes next. You have <b><i>absolutely</i></b> gone farther than anyone else I know of in exploring the motivators and consequences of strategy across voting systems, and if my appreciation of that fact didn't come through, I'm sorry. (Green-Armytage has some answers you don't about motivators, and Smith's IEVS has some about consequences, but your work is by far the best for combining the two.)</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" style="font:inherit"><div>I wonder if this volatility is a matter of degree or a general question of </div>
<div>approach.</div></td></tr></tbody></table></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Well, I've never seen you try to justify the volatility in terms of realism. It's a computational trick, to prevent excessive equilibrium, from what I can tell. That is, your unrealistic (perfectly rational in some ways but utterly lacking in any meta-rationality) voters may need this unrealistic assumption to give more-realistic answers, and if so, then "fixing" this one issue is not the answer. (If there were no volatility, I think that your system would end up comparing a lot of 100%/0% numbers, which doesn't discriminate very well between systems.)</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" style="font:inherit">
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<div>I want to note in case it's not clear that when I talk about what strategies voters are</div>
<div>using, that is just a reporting mechanism that has awareness of the relationship</div>
<div>between voters' sincere preferences and how they actually voted. The voters have</div>
<div>no idea what they are doing in strategic or sincere terms.</div></td></tr></tbody></table></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Yes, I understand that.</div><div> </div><div>Cheers,</div><div>Jameson</div></div>