Topics created by Kaptain5

If you have an allocation game dividing a budget, a pizza, etc... this game is zero-sum in the sense that a you getting a slice of pizza is a slice that isn't going to me.

If you are negotiating with an agent who you are unsure is altruistic, rational, or spiteful there is a strategic incentive to misrepresent as a spiteful agent. An altruistic agent gets less than their fair share and a spiteful agent gets more than the rational agent if they can credibly convince other agents they are spiteful. It is worth it to pay off a spiteful agent rather than provoke it.

So if you are trying to optimize for the social choice there's a big problem with spiteful agents. With limited information all agents are incentivized to misrepresent as spiteful and over-represent how much they care about minor concerns. And for making social choice with limited resources there is a genuine zero-sum nature to the problem. Rational agents operating in a zero-sum environment will behave spitefully (you having it is negatively correlated with me having it.)

So with that irrationality baked in, if we could magically find what the social choice was, with spiteful agents the social choice isn't very sociable. And spiteful agents should be common under resource constraints. This correlation between individual's utility functions will also heavily restrain the types of group choice sets which exist.

@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.

@lime I think that since multiwinner elections are generally for electing legislatures, we can say that generally the goal is for the set of winners to be able to vote on laws in such a way that the laws passed maximize voter utility (i.e. come closest to their preferences on the issues). Now since this is difficult to simulate, how about simplifying it down to an election-based process: have the winners of the multiwinner election conduct a single-winner election among themselves to choose a leader (presumably using whatever single-winner voting method the original multiwinner election's voting method simplifies to), and then see how much utility the original voters in the multiwinner election receive from that leader compared to the amount of utility those original voters would get from the leader they would have elected if they had themselves voted in the single-winner election.
Essentially, test how much utility voters would get from the Prime Minister chosen by Parliament versus their utility if they directly elected a President instead.

The same idea is covered at [https://rangevoting.org/BRmulti.html](link url)

@lime definitely, that’s a major problem with the agent based models, the choice of parameters can’t be validated without the data. A friend of mine is trying to work with ABMs for tumor microenvironments, which in a sense may not be too far off from what we’re trying to do lol

@jack-waugh said in Super-STAR: Dynamically rescaled score runnoff:

@lime said in Super-STAR: Dynamically rescaled score runnoff:

@kaptain5 The ideal would be to find a somewhat-objective normalization with a mechanism like quadratic voting or VCG. Each voter has to "pay for" their rating points by giving something up (like votes they could cast in another election).

No, because that's exactly the problem with choose-one plurality. I have as a voter the right to support and oppose so many candidates via my vote as I support and oppose in my political stance or judgment. Choose-one plurality single-winner voting says I have to pay a "cost", which is the entirety of my precious vote, as soon as I support one candidate. Support and opposition must be free of cost, because I am a citizen and deserve a full vote, the same as any other citizen.

I think the thread you linked is based on a misunderstanding. The quadratic voting penalty is applied across different races, not in the same one. So, for example, you can either cast 10 votes for President, or you could cast 5 for President, 5 for Governor, 5 in some ballot initiative, and 5 in Congress. (Adds to 100.)

The squared-cost penalty is chosen so you'll honestly reveal your relative preferences across different issues, under an impartial culture model. I assume you could do better than an impartial culture model, but the point is more that you should be able to trade influence across decisions to have a bigger impact on the issues where your preferences are stronger.