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)