In terms of consolidation we have the electowiki, which is a good place to put stuff.
But you can search the forum quite easily. Click on the magnifying glass at the top and you can search for terms. I can normally find what I'm looking for fairly quickly. I would say this is better than for other discussion groups like Reddit or Facebook.
Just to clarify what's happening here:
A maximal lottery result can be something like:
A: 50%
B: 30%
C : 20%
where these are the probabilities of the candidates A, B and C being elected. So is non-uniqueness simply that sometimes there might be another probability distribution that is also optimal? E.g.
A: 55%
B: 35%
C : 10%
(Or maybe some sort of continuum of optimal results.)
You said that where preferences are strict and the number of voters is odd, there will be a unique solution. Is this simply because an even number of voters can lead to a head-to-head tie between two candidates, or is there something else more complex going on with an even number of voters? It seems intuitive to me that it's just because ties can happen.
In the case of ties, this isn't a problem unique to Maximal Lotteries. You can get ties in any voting method, e.g. FPTP and have to deal with that somehow. With a big election, ties will be rare. Obviously it's less likely with FPTP because it requires a tie at the top, whereas with Maximal Lotteries, there can be a tie between any pair of candidates potentially affecting the result.
It can be argued that in the case of more than one optimal lottery, it doesn't matter which one you choose because they are all optimal for the voters. Some will work out better for some candidates (a higher probability of election), but elections are about what voters want. They're not really about the candidates.
In the same way that a lottery generates the winning candidate, you can simply have a random mechanism to determine which lottery to use. I don't see this as a major problem in the general scheme of things.
@cfrank I've had a short look at it. The main conclusion seems to be that you can approximate maximal lotteries with balls in urns!
@cfrank I'll try and have a look in the next few days.
@cfrank I think lottery methods in general are interesting and worth looking into. Looking at the Wikipedia page, it seems interesting that this would satisfy participation but not monotonicity, which is the opposite of most Condorcet methods. So while some might criticise it for failing monotonicity (seen as easy to get in a Condorcet method), the prize is arguably better, since elections are really about voters rather than candidates.
@kaptain5 said in Professional Politicians skew towards altrusism? [study to read]:
In this study an interesting finding was that on average politicians we behaving altruistically (giving more to the other party than they would receive). On average over all sampled politicians were giving 49% of the prize to political opponents and giving 57% to in-group members. Compared to most other studies of the ultimatum game this is far above most people and very far above the rational expectation. The result is also remarkably consistent between countries. When the out-group and in-group results are combined this gives the result that the politicians surveyed are slightly altruistic in the game.
This one surprised me, I expected the politicians surveyed to be much more greedy.
I haven't properly read the paper but this bit is interesting, and I've been considering whether we should be surprised or not. Politicians certainly have a reputation for being greedy and corruptible. But a lot of people who go into politics probably do so for the right reasons - that they actually want to make things better for people and remove unfairness etc.
I think there is more corruption at the top, but this isn't most politicians. Plus I also think that higher-up politicians might still have some good principles, but these conflict with other things that get in the way of that - wanting to get in with the right people, make the right deals etc. So removed from politics, they still might make fair decisions. They just happen to be morally weak in certain ways.
This looks interesting. I'm not sure I've necessarily got that much to add though but I'll see what comes out...
You're looking at utility, but this is with real people rather than a simulation, so I wonder how this will work.
Are they voting for more abstract things in which case will you ask the participants for their honest utility rating of the options in addition to their actual votes? Or are they voting for options that directly benefit them in a clearer way - e.g. option 1 means voters A, B and C get this amount of money/chocolate etc.
It will be interesting to see equilibria emerging from repeated elections, and which methods are more stable in that respect. There is obviously the question of how relevant this would be in the real world. National elections generally take place several years apart and a lot can change in between, and so voters wouldn't be able to apply game theory in the same way as they would with multiple elections close together under the same conditions. And also I imagine people in the study are more likely to be "clued up" than the average member of the public.
So that raises a question - with multiple elections, will it just be the same conditions each time just to see how the methods behave in these ideal conditions, or will certain variables change to make it more "realistic", or possibly you'd model both? Both would be interesting in their own ways.
This looks quite nice. Presumably for PR elections? I came up with something similarish when doing a mixed member system that used score/approval ballots, and you could vote for candidates and their parties together / separately.
I've seen weighted seats proposed before. It is a fairly intuitive idea, so nothing new. But my instinct is that I don't think it's such a good idea. I think there is something to be said for a parliament made up of people with equal power.
Would the weighting purely count towards their voting power in the elected body, or does it have other effects such as more time to speak?
I think one problem is that it there might be a "celebrity" effect. If multiple candidates are standing for one party, the best well known one is likely to take most of the power available to that party without necessarily being "better".
Also while it's based on votes, voters don't get a say in this weighting. I might prefer candidate A to B (from the same party, or having similar ideals) by a small amount but might still prefer them to have equal power in parliament rather than having all the power directed to A. So I'd have to weigh up what I think other people will vote for and then vote in the opposite direction to balance it out.
If democracy was working properly in the first place, there should be enough candidates out there to represent your views without having pin everything on potentially just one candidate - a single point of failure.
@cfrank said in Idea for truly proportional representation:
@Toby-Pereira I wonder what you think about this, since you have deeper knowledge of PR systems.
Just to let you know I've seen this, but I'll get back to you in the next few days. For some reason I'm not getting much time to post on here at the moment!
There is an online obituary if you want to read it here.
@cfrank While I'm not an expert in how to make methods pass particular criteria, participation seems to be a very hard one to get. Most of the methods that pass it seem to be simple adding up ones (e.g. FPTP, Borda, approval, score), although Descending Solid Coalitions and Descending Acquiescing Coalitions are slightly weird methods that do pass it apparently.
@cfrank said in Fixing Participation Failure in “Approval vs B2R”:
(6) Run a secondary, independent head-to-head election between the B2R winner and their adversary, with the following caveats:
--> Voters are not tied down in any way to their original preference between the B2R winner and the adversary, and can freely vote for either in the independent head-to-head. Also, voters who did not participate in the first round are fully allowed to participate in the final round. By default, voters' original ballots will be used to determine the preference, but voters may opt in to swap their rating either 0 or 1 times, whichever amount is necessary to indicate an advantage that they wish to disclose.
--> However, based on these swaps, we can count the net number of swaps that are advantageous to the adversary over the B2R winner compared with the original ballots. If this number is positive, the election proceeds as you would expect, with ties broken by the sort order. However, if the number is not positive, if the original head-to-head was in favor of the B2R survivor, and if a material difference would be incurred, then the adversary will be conferred an automatic +1 head-to-head advantage, and will also automatically win ties.
I find this part a bit hard to understand.
Also, if it's an independent head-to-head, do you mean a separate trip to the polling station, or just a separate part of the ballot paper? If it's a separate trip, then it would be impossible to manage the swaps and each voter's default position without losing anonymity.
@kodos I've changed it so new users have to register with an e-mail address. I don't think that's too onerous, and it should make the problem go away.
@kodos I'll have a look to see if I can find a way to change that or if it's "hardwired" in.
If you're pitting the winners of two methods against each other, what do you do if it's the same candidate? Are they just the winner, or does there need to be a final head-to-head between two candidates?
@kodos I also have admin powers but wasn't aware this was a thing either. But I've just looked at the user list in the admin section and it seems that you have no e-mail address by your name. That could be the problem. It might be worth trying to add an e-mail address to your account. I think you'll then need to verify it by clicking on a link that gets e-mailed to you or something.
@toby-pereira said in General stuff about approval/cardinal PR:
This project hasn't purely been altruistic - it's been helpful to me by laying everything out for reworking my COWPEA paper!
And the new version can be seen here (as I mentioned in the separate COWPEA thread anyway).
The paper has been updated and some errors corrected.