80 KAM Mathematical Colloquium
Michel L. Balinski
Ecole Polytechnique
DON'T VOTE!: JUDGE
patek 10. unora 2012 ve 14:00, poslucharna S5, druhe patro
KAM MFF UK
Malostranske nam. 25
118 00 Praha 1
Abstract
Voting mechanisms used throughout the world are in deep trouble. People are slowly but surely becoming aware that they do not work properly. The outputs---winners and orders-of-finish of candidates---are not the true choices of electorates.Why? Voters' inputs do not permit an adequate expression of their opinions. More fundamentally, the theory of voting (or ``social choice'') has hypothesized an inadequate model that leads to paradoxes and impossibility theorems (notably, Arrow's). That model assumes that voters' inputs are rank-orders of the candidates.
What can be done? It suffices to formulate a new model in which voters' inputs are evaluations of candidates. Instead of ranking candidates, or of naming one (``first-past-the-post'') or several (``approval voting''), they are given grades. A candidate's final grade---her majority-grade---is the grade that a majority of the electorate prefers to any other grade. The order-of-finish---the majority-ranking---is determined by the candidates' majority-grades.
This change in paradigm leads to a method---majority judgment---that avoids the important traditional paradoxes and impossibilities, elicits honest opinions, resists manipulation, is meaningful in measurement, and gives voters the right to truly express their opinions. It may be characterized in several ways as the only method that meets different subsets of these properties.
The method has been used and/or tested in various spheres: political elections, judging wines, discerning an international prize, ranking applicants for university positions, electing members of the British Academy.
This talk will give an overview of the method and theory via concrete examples.
Reference: Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki, Majority Judgment: Measuring, Ranking, and Electing, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.
