I'm designing an experiment on voting systems, what would you like to see?
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Research Question: A common goal in designing voting systems is to maximize group utility/welfare. But in the real world individuals and sub-groups act selfishly to maximize their own utility. The game theory dynamics of an electorate can be hard to simulate, therefore this research proposal will put participants into a repeated "voting game" to identify nash equilibria empirically.
Methodology- It is empirically observed that groups of voters can be highly correlated. A common modeling simplification for voting theory is considering those blocks as one weighted vote. My method will have human participants make the decisions for the voting blocks instead of attempting to simulate what a selfish imperfect-utility-maximizing person might do. Participants will be screened for competitive people trying to win.
My question to the community is:
What do you want to see tested?
This is a great way to get experimental data points for assessing different voting systems and assumptions. Why hypothesizes would you like to see tested?Concerns with methodology or validity?
I'm not sharing the full methodology I have planned until I finish the first experiment; but feedback on any concerns or issues with the validity of this type of experiment would be appreciated. -
@kaptain5 said in I'm designing an experiment on voting systems, what would you like to see?:
My method will have human participants make the decisions for the voting blocks instead of attempting to simulate what a selfish imperfect-utility-maximizing person might do. Participants will be screened for competitive people trying to win.
Interesting for sure. It makes sense you would not want to share the full methodology if this is original research. I do have questions, I'm curious primarily about the scope of the simulation, because my observation is that often the routes to exploitation of systems are discovered by operating outside of or on the boundaries of their intended framing. For example, some questions would be, how are participants encouraged to be competitive? Will they engage in (quasi) long-run participation so that they can learn from the strategies of others? Which voting systems are you considering to test, and how large scale would this study be in terms of the number of participants?
I personally think key systems to include would be vote-for-one (obviously), approval, score, STAR, IRV, and a Condorcet method (I would suggest bottom-2-runoff). I would say it's important to keep in mind limitations of these, especially in terms of independence of clones.
I am not wholly familiar with the findings in this field, but I think it would be very helpful to see how coalitions emerge in different voting settings.
This is probably well outside the scope of what you want to investigate, but I personally would be happy to see this kind of system simulated:
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/299/pr-with-ambassador-quotas-and-cake-cutting-incentives/6So IMO some basic questions would be about the emergence of coalitions, investigating the stability of multi-party coalitions versus duopolistic structures. Resistance to outsized influence of radical minority factions would also be good to test if possible.
In this realm, a question myself and @SaraWolk found interesting is whether "over time the two opposing factions [naturally] become more and more polarized." (see https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/586/is-duopoly-more-resistant-to-fascism)
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@cfrank Thanks for the feedback! I will keep this in mind. For this trial I will only explore single-winner systems.
My study should be sensitive to:
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Party structure
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Effects of repeated elections (a series of elections can be viewed like a repeated prisoners dilemma. There is are equalibria at lose-lose and win-win. I should be able to discriminate differences in incentives towards either equalibria if they exist.)
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Validate or invalidate certain assumptions about how strategic voters playing well (but not perfectly) might behave
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The types of strategies which are actually nash equalibria in repeated stochastic incomplete information with human players. (strategy which is proven to be optimal in a complete information simultaneous 1-shot game, might not be optimal in a repeated stochastic incomplete information version.)
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Discriminating between strategies which might be optimal in a 1-shot version but bad in a repeated game (stabbing allies for example.)
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Level of exploitation an incumbent or leading coalition can leverage
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Failure modes
My study will not be sensitive to:
- exact values (this method is 5% better than this method).
- declaring a winner between similar methods.
- matching the distributions of real-world elections.
- exhaustive testing
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@Toby-Pereira @Lime @Marcus-Ogren
Interested in your opinions on this -
This looks interesting. I'm not sure I've necessarily got that much to add though but I'll see what comes out...
You're looking at utility, but this is with real people rather than a simulation, so I wonder how this will work.
Are they voting for more abstract things in which case will you ask the participants for their honest utility rating of the options in addition to their actual votes? Or are they voting for options that directly benefit them in a clearer way - e.g. option 1 means voters A, B and C get this amount of money/chocolate etc.
It will be interesting to see equilibria emerging from repeated elections, and which methods are more stable in that respect. There is obviously the question of how relevant this would be in the real world. National elections generally take place several years apart and a lot can change in between, and so voters wouldn't be able to apply game theory in the same way as they would with multiple elections close together under the same conditions. And also I imagine people in the study are more likely to be "clued up" than the average member of the public.
So that raises a question - with multiple elections, will it just be the same conditions each time just to see how the methods behave in these ideal conditions, or will certain variables change to make it more "realistic", or possibly you'd model both? Both would be interesting in their own ways.
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@toby-pereira Thanks for the feedback!
National elections generally take place several years apart and a lot can change in between, and so voters wouldn't be able to apply game theory in the same way as they would with multiple elections close together under the same conditions. And also I imagine people in the study are more likely to be "clued up" than the average member of the public.
One of my goals is looking towards what the long-run equalibria might be after people have figured out the system. So in this way I see that as a plus.
So that raises a question - with multiple elections, will it just be the same conditions each time just to see how the methods behave in these ideal conditions, or will certain variables change to make it more "realistic", or possibly you'd model both? Both would be interesting in their own ways.
In trying to set up the models one of my conclusions is that a "correct" set of parameters doesn't exist. I think instead of trying to make a study "correct" or "accurate" it would be more useful to search for robustness. A common result of repeated games is multiple Nash Equalibria. Another common result is sensitive Nash Equalibria. So if one number changes slightly a whole new set of equalibria might be optimal now. So I think it is important to vary conditions to see if an equilibrium is stable.
Reading on different strategies and failure conditions of voting systems you come across some really weird ones where it is technically optimal to do make some really weird decision. But that often requires very specific information. An important concept I came across while brushing up on my game theory is imperfect and incomplete information. When you change the information available it can sometimes change what the Nash Equilibrium strategy is. There's also an idea that a strategy might not be optimal over any specific set of game parameters but is optimal when you are unsure of the exact parameters. The more limited the information the simpler a game sometimes becomes.