There is this funky "rule" in Ec 101 that one may never add utility curves.
But, in the real world, the 51% may choose to do something intolerable to the 49%.
A true "bug in democracy".
By the way, these sorts of observations have links to critical race theory (a term that most people have no idea what it means ...). Defending Eve's rights, as part of a minority with a very strong opinion, is a tough one.
In standard practice you assign utility curves to individuals which can be demonstrated by what choices the individual makes / will make.
However, when there are two people the "utility curve" model doesn't work so well because you cannot similarly measure how much someone dislikes something vs how much someone else likes it.
This is a standard Kahn & Tav sorta inefficiency that creates things like strikes at the workplace.
I see from your link that you argue against this idea, but adding utility curves is outside the mainstream. Of course, the main argument in favor of money is that money is a vehicle for solving the problem, but social justice warriors tend to look askance at solely money based ways of resolving differences.
I could debate with you about harsanyi, and it is somewhat relevant to sam's blog and democracy, but the main problem with this approach is that I cannot trust what person X says about what they would do it they were person Y.
I still wonder about "ground rules" for a good voting system.
Shall we stipulate that the opinion of a tenured Princeton professor should count exactly the same as that of a multiply convicted felon, and that the opinion of a 17-year-old should count for nothing?
I fear that a lot of differences in how we conduct elections can be mapped back to unstated, but highly debatable, opinions.
To give an example often quoted by J. Posner, the political opinions of parents who are raising children are known to differ quite widely from the opinions of the childless. A possible result of this is social programs that stiff children and leave a lot of them in poverty - while seniors collect generous benefits.
But this is just one example of an unstated ground rule that can be challenged.
In the news today we see Sarah Palin and Mark Begich going after each other on who would be the stronger opponent for Peltola ... if only we had the ranked-choice date on Begich vs Peltola ... sigh
You might be interested in Levin and Nalebuff (1995) who compared different election systems using British Union election data. "An interesting feature of these British elections is that voters are required to rank the candidates. As a result, knowing the voter ranking, we can simulate elections under a variety of electoral systems. It is perhaps remarkable that among the 30 elections we examined, with the exception of plurality rule and single transferable vote, none of the other seven alternatives considered gave a different top choice (see later section). The systems differed in the rankings of the lower candidates. This empirical regularity suggests a connection to some recent theoretical work (Caplin and Nalebuff, 1988, 1991): when voter preferences are sufficiently similar, a variety of voting systems lead to similar choices, and these choices have desirable properties."
Recently, I've come to appreciate some of the advantages of ranked choice over approval voting (specifically the latter is susceptible to electoral ambushes by small but motivated slivers of the electorate). But we shouldn't lose sight of the empirical data suggesting that anything other than plurality voting will tend to give similar results.
There are many ways to run an election, but doing ranked choice and throwing out people by "fewest first place votes" is just stupid.
Let's say there is a four way election: a democratic socialist, a lefty democrat, a moderate democrat and a republican. If I am a democratic socialist, my actual preference is 1,2,3 and 4. But now I am stuck just like I would have been in first-past-the-post, and I have to consider giving my top pick to the moderate democrat and ranking them 3,2,1 and 4.
Some elected Peltola, and some elected Begich, the Condorcet winner.
I have heard the term "center squeeze" applied to the problem of a candidate who is too closely surrounded by competitors on either side along a left-right axis. It's an interesting question how to reduce the odds of such an outcome.
One outcome that was avoided was the election of a "Condorcet loser," someone who loses to the other major opponents. Palin was such a candidate.
Nice work by you here, and people like Ben Petschel need to be thanked at every opportunity.
But when you say "It's an interesting question how to reduce the odds of such an outcome.", I do not know what is interesting about a problem that is solved by a double nested loop comparing n candidates in n*(n-1)/2 match ups ...
However, I am naively assuming that voters will honestly rank the candidates - and there is currently great incentive NOT to do that.
The measure of voting method performance is voter satisfaction efficiency. Literally the expected utility voters get.
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/
@Clay - wouldn't you think condorcet should always produce max satisfaction?
of course not. suppose we have:
alice: x5 y4
bob x5 y4
eve x2 y5
a majority prefers x but y has a greater total utility.
Ah right.
There is this funky "rule" in Ec 101 that one may never add utility curves.
But, in the real world, the 51% may choose to do something intolerable to the 49%.
A true "bug in democracy".
By the way, these sorts of observations have links to critical race theory (a term that most people have no idea what it means ...). Defending Eve's rights, as part of a minority with a very strong opinion, is a tough one.
I don't know what you mean that you don't add utility "curves". social utility is just the sum of individual utilities.
https://link.medium.com/hd13R3fk3yb
this is an Ec 101 kinda thing.
In standard practice you assign utility curves to individuals which can be demonstrated by what choices the individual makes / will make.
However, when there are two people the "utility curve" model doesn't work so well because you cannot similarly measure how much someone dislikes something vs how much someone else likes it.
This is a standard Kahn & Tav sorta inefficiency that creates things like strikes at the workplace.
I see from your link that you argue against this idea, but adding utility curves is outside the mainstream. Of course, the main argument in favor of money is that money is a vehicle for solving the problem, but social justice warriors tend to look askance at solely money based ways of resolving differences.
I could debate with you about harsanyi, and it is somewhat relevant to sam's blog and democracy, but the main problem with this approach is that I cannot trust what person X says about what they would do it they were person Y.
I still wonder about "ground rules" for a good voting system.
Shall we stipulate that the opinion of a tenured Princeton professor should count exactly the same as that of a multiply convicted felon, and that the opinion of a 17-year-old should count for nothing?
I fear that a lot of differences in how we conduct elections can be mapped back to unstated, but highly debatable, opinions.
To give an example often quoted by J. Posner, the political opinions of parents who are raising children are known to differ quite widely from the opinions of the childless. A possible result of this is social programs that stiff children and leave a lot of them in poverty - while seniors collect generous benefits.
But this is just one example of an unstated ground rule that can be challenged.
In the news today we see Sarah Palin and Mark Begich going after each other on who would be the stronger opponent for Peltola ... if only we had the ranked-choice date on Begich vs Peltola ... sigh
You might be interested in Levin and Nalebuff (1995) who compared different election systems using British Union election data. "An interesting feature of these British elections is that voters are required to rank the candidates. As a result, knowing the voter ranking, we can simulate elections under a variety of electoral systems. It is perhaps remarkable that among the 30 elections we examined, with the exception of plurality rule and single transferable vote, none of the other seven alternatives considered gave a different top choice (see later section). The systems differed in the rankings of the lower candidates. This empirical regularity suggests a connection to some recent theoretical work (Caplin and Nalebuff, 1988, 1991): when voter preferences are sufficiently similar, a variety of voting systems lead to similar choices, and these choices have desirable properties."
Recently, I've come to appreciate some of the advantages of ranked choice over approval voting (specifically the latter is susceptible to electoral ambushes by small but motivated slivers of the electorate). But we shouldn't lose sight of the empirical data suggesting that anything other than plurality voting will tend to give similar results.
Except the results are now in for Alaska and ... they elected the wrong person.
Begich was, in fact, preferred over both Palin and Peltola - it is right there on the ballots.
But the dummies threw out Begich in the first round and gave the seat to the voters' second choice.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-republicans-might-lose-alaska-again-mary-peltola-nick-begich-sarah-palin-ranked-choice-voting-11663191650?st=xnsfpz1dvz0v0wt&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
There are many ways to run an election, but doing ranked choice and throwing out people by "fewest first place votes" is just stupid.
Let's say there is a four way election: a democratic socialist, a lefty democrat, a moderate democrat and a republican. If I am a democratic socialist, my actual preference is 1,2,3 and 4. But now I am stuck just like I would have been in first-past-the-post, and I have to consider giving my top pick to the moderate democrat and ranking them 3,2,1 and 4.
I ran those ballots through a script that implements several dozen different ways of tabulating ranked choices. https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/28521-election
Some elected Peltola, and some elected Begich, the Condorcet winner.
I have heard the term "center squeeze" applied to the problem of a candidate who is too closely surrounded by competitors on either side along a left-right axis. It's an interesting question how to reduce the odds of such an outcome.
One outcome that was avoided was the election of a "Condorcet loser," someone who loses to the other major opponents. Palin was such a candidate.
Nice work by you here, and people like Ben Petschel need to be thanked at every opportunity.
But when you say "It's an interesting question how to reduce the odds of such an outcome.", I do not know what is interesting about a problem that is solved by a double nested loop comparing n candidates in n*(n-1)/2 match ups ...
However, I am naively assuming that voters will honestly rank the candidates - and there is currently great incentive NOT to do that.