Algorithmic Asset Voting: Difference between revisions

== Lewis Carroll's own likely observations that Asset is intended to be Condorcet-efficient ==

Lewis Carroll is the first known inventor of Asset Voting. In a passage in an article<ref>[https://www.rangevoting.org/BlackCarrollAER2.pdf Lewis Carroll and the Theory of Games, Duncan Black] (starting at the sentence "Suppose we have a multimember constituency..." on Page 4 and ending at the sentence "In general, however, an operational answer to the problem is again not feasible." on Page 5)</ref> describing his thought process in developing Asset, Carroll appears to have noted that the ideal PR scheme would involve voters forming into sets of coalitions, and then, when enough voters prefer a different set of coalitions than the one that is currently formed, a different set of coalitions is formed, and this repeats until no more improvement is possible. He also notes that it is possible to, by looking at ranked ballots, figure out what sets of coalitions might occur if the voters were acting "rationally" (most likely meaning maximally strategically), and he even solves a few examples where such an approach yields different results from STV, though it is noted that at the time, the full computation for this process when looking at the ballots for a large-scale election would've been "indeterminate". This all appears to establish that Carroll was interested in finding a Condorcet equilibrium for the final set of winners, and saw Asset as the easiest way to do it, because he believed the candidates' preferences would be close enough to the voters' preferences to make the candidates' Condorcet equilibrium more Condorcet-efficient by voter preference standards than STV.

 

== References ==