Forest wrote: >The Gibbard-Satterthwaite result doesn't rule out Alex's SVM (Small Voting >Machine) when you take into account that the voting machine is supposed to >apply the OPTIMAL strategy, which is sometimes a probabilistic mixture of >pure strategies requiring coin tosses, die throwing, or needle spinning.
If we bloc all people who have similar preference orders and consider each to be a single player, couldn't we model such strategies as saying the bloc divided over strategy? e.g. In a plurality race, some fraction of Nader supporters might hold fast and vote for him, while others may strategically vote insincerely for Gore. This is equivalent then to a single player "dividing his vote." It would seem that such probabilistic strategies could then be modeled as single players dividing up their available votes in different ways. In a ranked method the player might hand in a million sincerely marked ballots and a million insincere ballots to represent the fact that the people in his bloc were divided on whether to vote sincerely or strategize for a better outcome. The method then becomes deterministic again, and it would seem like the theorem should hold. Of course, there could easily be an error in my argument... Alex ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
