Utility: Difference between revisions

 

There are two ways to derive ranked ballots using ordinal utility. The first is for a voter to ask themselves "who are the candidates I would want to win if I could choose the winner myself?" This is equivalent to asking who you would honestly vote for in [[FPTP]], and it shows who your 1st choice(s) are. If you then remove them from consideration and repeat the question, you find your 2nd choices, etc. The second way is for a voter to ask themselves, for every possible [[head-to-head matchup]], who they'd prefer. The [[Copeland]] ranking shows the voter's ranking of the candidates. This is arguably one way to justify [[Smith-efficient]] [[Condorcet methods]]: if, for an individual voter, the best candidate(s) are the ones from the smallest group that win all head-to-head matchups against all other candidates based only on that voter's judgment, then why not for society? Similar reasoning shows why [[Score voting]] can be justified using rated utilities in head-to-head matchups to quantify harm or benefit done to the voter.