This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Union College research fellowship, summer 2009
Advisor: Prof. William Zwicker
Based upon work by Ari Morse and Andy Mackenzie
Official abstract:
We continue research into the mediancentre voting rule, the recently introduced variant of the Borda count. In particular, we extend the investigation of this rule to beyond 3 alternatives. We have determined that at up to 4 alternatives, the mediancentre rule seems to outperform the mean rule in terms of manipulability, as expected. We have also found that it seems to have a higher Condorcet efficiency. Finally, we have continued work on finding reliable ways to find ties, and we have found two classes of profiles that we believe describe all 2-way ties for 3 alternatives.
To describe it in less esoteric terms: this project was a continuation of a long line of student research in voting theory, a discipline of mathematics that is much more interesting than it sounds due to some surprising limitations on what a voting system can do. This project involved writing and using a set of programs to probe the properties of the mediancentre rule, a voting system invented by Prof. William Zwicker. This line of research is certainly incomplete; the final report represents the results from the first attempts to expand our investigation to 4 candidates or more. Much remains to be explored, and many problems remained to be resolved (e.g. we are yet to find a reliable way to detect ties).
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.