Jonathan Lundell wrote:
...or at least to avoid methods that encourage strategic voting, is that
voters are so bad at it.
I blogged a rather dismaying study the other day on the subject of
people's tendency to irrationally misjudge probabilities when they have
a stake in the outcome. I wouldn't want to draw too close a parallel
between this and any particular election method. Rather, it's something
to keep in mind when we talk about voters trying to make strategic
calculations that they're not really competent, in general, to make.
Notice also that there's a systematic bias; it's not just that the
subjects are wrong in a random way that might tend to cancel out.
Maybe this means that for strategies where people are required to
cooperate for it to have any effect, the voters will be less likely to
attempt it, judging (if incorrectly) that few others are going to. I'm
thinking of strategies like collective burial in Condorcet methods.
On another note, Abd says the only method that got better Bayesian
Regret scores than Range, among those Warren has tested, is Range + top
two runoff. To my knowledge, that's not true, as Warren says a DSV
variant of Range got better scores than Range itself (according to this
post:
http://listas.apesol.org/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2005-October/017331.html
). Again, this suggests that if you absolutely have to have a method
where strategy is required to get it to work, use a computer to do the
strategy since it'll be much better at it than the voters will. What you
say only reinforces this point.
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