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From: cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: Voting Paradoxes
Summary: Voting paradoxes always exist
Message-ID: <1710@l.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 13 Nov 89 22:12:19 GMT
References: <6901@ficc.uu.net> <3899@sbcs.sunysb.edu>
Distribution: usa
Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department
Lines: 24

In article <3899@sbcs.sunysb.edu>, brnstnd@stealth.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
> In article <6901@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
< > There are people who insist in bringing up voting paradoxes to show why
< > this or that system is a bad idea.
< 
<   [ Martin Gardner occasionally reported proofs that voting paradoxes
<     always exist ]
< 
> Fortunately, the proofs (and paradoxes) do not apply to approval voting,
> as in Alien's MAUVE. Approval voting claims to compute the total amount
> of happiness that the voters would have with each choice, and that's what
> it does compute (by addition). Dave Mack's comments about ``separating
> whether you want the group from its name'' are invalid: if you can't
> find a 100-vote-happiness margin for sci.aquaria and you can't find a
> 100-vote-happiness margin for rec.aquaria, then neither should be
> created.

It is easy to show rigorously that there is no way to avoid voting paradoxes.
That is, no matter what criteria you have, it is possible to construct a
paradoxical scenario.  This is the "social welfare problem."
-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet, UUCP)