See below for my two cents worth. On Thu, 28 Nov 2002, Douglas Greene wrote:
> This is primarily directed to Mike, but I'd like to know why list members > support Condorcet over cardinal rankings/range voting. BTW, I've posted > Warren Smith's work on range voting to our Yahoo!Group. There are at least two questions here. (1) What kind of ballot? and (2) How to use the ballot information to pick the winner? Personally, I prefer the greater freedom of the range/CR/grade ballot, but not the scoring method that is usually assumed as part of the package, namely giving the win to the candidate with the highest average rating/grade. The trouble with that scoring method is that voters soon see the advantages of rating/grading almost exclusively at the extremes of the allowed range. The strategic cost of greater expressivity is high. A better way of scoring is to count all ratings above midrange as passing grades, and all below as failing. The candidate with the highest number of passing grades wins the election. This method is statistically and strategically equivalent to the standard version of CR, but does not penalize expressivity. There are other ways of scoring these types of ballots that may offer additional advantages, including ways that give the win to the pairwise beats all candidate if there is one, in other words, ways satisfying various possible generalized Condorcet Criteria. Grade ballots are simpler, less confusing, and more flexible than ballots that require strict rankings (with or without possible truncations), and any reasonable method of scoring a ranked ballot can be adapted to grade ballots. The rank scoring method that is most analogous to the highest average rating is the highest average ranking, i.e. the Borda Count. The inflative pressure to the extremes in the CR version shows up in Borda as high pressure incentive for insincere ranking. In the context of rankings, good Condorcet scoring methods relieve most of this pressure to the point where the cost of sincere ranking is balanced by the satisfaction of sincere expression. In the context of ratings, Condorcet analogous methods relieve most of the pressure to the point where the cost of uninflated ratings is balanced by the satisfaction of sincere expression. >From another point of view, the simplest CR method, namely Approval (How do you rate the candidates on a scale of zero to one?) is favored over the various Condorcet methods by many list members, especially when it comes to public proposals for the near future. So perhaps this list does give range voting its appropriate due. Forest ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em