On Mon, 23 Feb 2009, David Molnar wrote:
Dale,
I'd just like to point out that you express a concern about the effects of
voting strategically under the Condorcet or ranked pairs method, then you
propose a different system and tell people how they should game it.
I suppose I did. But I can do worse:
You first determine (via polling or just your best guess) what the two
front-runners are (i.e., which two candidates are most-likely to win); of
those two, you give one the top score and one the bottom, based on your
preference. For all other candidates, if you like it better than your
preferred front-runner, you also give it the maximum score; if you like it
less than your dis-preferred front-runner, you also give it the minimum
score. Any remaining candidates should be linearly-scaled where you find
appropriate between the two front-runners.
There's a reason the book was called "Gaming the Vote".
But all voting systems are susceptible to strategic manipulation: score
voting performs best with a completely strategic electorate, but it also
performs best* with a completely honest electorate.
I'm going to try to stop myself from evangelizing now: we should talk
about restrictions/themes for the winter contest, and whether it will
happen at all. I only see two games that have had any activity on the
wiki in the last month, are there more out there that would enter the
contest?
--
Dale Sheldon
dales@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
*As long as there are at least 4 candidates, not that it does poorly with
2 or 3.