Mike R wrote: > Steve Eppley wrote: -snip- >> The obvious question is, why prefer Kemeny's method? >> What criteria does it satisfy that other methods fail >> that are more important than the criteria other methods >> satisfy that Kemeny fails? > > I like Kemeny-Young is because it has many of what I > consider "must have" voting characteristics (Condorcet and > Extended Condorcet, especially), plus it removes voting > cycles, is resistant to voting manipulation, and it orders > all of the candidates (useful when more than one candidate > can win or when an elected candidate cannot serve).
I'm not sure what Mike means by some of those terms. (Extended Condorcet? Cycle "removal"? Voting manipulation "resistance"?) I wonder if he can tell me if MAM, described at www.alumni.caltech.edu/~seppley, meets those criteria. MAM does satisfy the above criteria that I do understand: It chooses within the top cycle, hence is Condorcet-consistent, and it socially orders all the candidates. (Like Kemeny, MAM's ordering satisfies local independence of irrelevant alternatives, and, unlike Kemeny, MAM satisfies a stronger criterion, immunity from majority complaints.) Also, MAM can be tallied in a time that's a small polynomial function of the number of voters and the number of candidates. -snip- > If there is a method you prefer, you might show me > an example of how Kemeny gets it wrong compared > to your favorite method. -snip- Kemeny finds the "best" social ordering by finding the ordering that maximizes the sum of sizes of majorities that agree with it. That makes it vulnerable to clone manipulation. MAM is equivalent to analogous method that finds the "best" social ordering by using the maxlexmax comparitor rather than the sum comparitor, so it's independent of clones. Here's an example to consider, involving Kemeny's vulnerability to clone alternatives. (I hope I have the example straight. I whipped it up fairly fast.) 9 voters, 3 alternatives: 4: A>B>C 3: B>C>A 2: C>A>B There are 3 majorities: 6 voters rank A over B. 7 voters rank B over C. 5 voters rank C over A. Nearly every method elects A here, yes? Kemeny and MAM pick A>B>C as the social ordering. Kemeny picks A>B>C because it agrees with 13 (the majority of 6 who voted "A>B" + the majority of 7 who voted "B>C"). Note that the social ordering B>C>A agrees with only 12 (the 7 "B>C" majority + the 5 "C>A" majority). (There's another definition of Kemeny that finds the social ordering that maximizes the sum of pairwise preferences that agree with it, rather than the sum of sizes of majorities that agree with it, but its principle is nearly equivalent, and a similar example illustrates its problem with clones.) Now add in one or more clones of C. Each clone added in adds another majority of size 5 to the Kemeny-best social ordering that ranks C over A than to the Kemeny-best social ordering that ranks A over C. Thus, adding a clone of C, say C', causes either B>C>C'>A or B>C'>C>A to become the Kemeny-best social ordering, changing the outcome from A to B. On informational grounds this is illogical, since no information about A or B is gained when voters also rank alternatives that are nearly identical to C. Worse, it creates incentives to manipulate the outcome by strategic nomination, and it could even lead to routine farces where each faction nominates as many (clone) alternatives as they can find that will pairwise-beat the alternative(s) that will pairwise-beat their favorite(s). (Using the other definition of Kemeny above, 2 or 3 clones of C would be added in part two of the example. Adding 2 leads to a tie between A and B, whereas adding 3 leads to electing B outright, assuming I haven't made a math mistake. With some more thought, I believe I could construct a "tighter" example where adding 1 clone leads to a tie between A and B and adding 2 clones leads to B winning outright.) If one considers immunity from majority complaints to be a reasonable criterion, that's another reason to prefer MAM over Kemeny (and other methods). --Steve ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info