I think that the intuition that D is a good compromise candidate (in the second example) is wrong, since each of the voters would prefer a random candidate out of {A,B,C} to D. In other words, a uniform lottery over {A,B,C} is a Pareto improvement on D.
Do you disagree with the wealth-transfer point? IE, it seems to me like a voting system should actively disincentivize wealth transfers to discourage the pathologicall pie-cutting disequilibria, which could destroy value in the long term via repeated tug of war over resources.
While the system should discourage utility transfers, if you build in a bias against transfers of nominal wealth, that favors certain political platforms over others.
I actually don’t think there’s a good way for a voting system to distinguish between transfers and simple inequality, so I think voting systems designed with this concern in mind will actually favor wealth (/utility) transfers that reduce inequality, rather than discouraging all transfers.
Either way, though, there’s inherently some political content in there, which is unfortunate in some sense.
I think that pie-cutting is usually negative-sum, because of diminishing returns and transaction costs. So, if you could make utilitarianism into a voting system it would at least ameliorate the problem (ofc we can’t easily do that because of dishonesty). However, ideally what we probably want is not utilitarianism but something like a bargaining solution. Moreover, in practice we don’t know the utility functions, so we should assume some prior distribution over possible utility functions and choose the voting system that minimizes some kind of expected regret.
I think that the intuition that D is a good compromise candidate (in the second example) is wrong, since each of the voters would prefer a random candidate out of {A,B,C} to D. In other words, a uniform lottery over {A,B,C} is a Pareto improvement on D.
Do you disagree with the wealth-transfer point? IE, it seems to me like a voting system should actively disincentivize wealth transfers to discourage the pathologicall pie-cutting disequilibria, which could destroy value in the long term via repeated tug of war over resources.
While the system should discourage utility transfers, if you build in a bias against transfers of nominal wealth, that favors certain political platforms over others.
Yes.
I actually don’t think there’s a good way for a voting system to distinguish between transfers and simple inequality, so I think voting systems designed with this concern in mind will actually favor wealth (/utility) transfers that reduce inequality, rather than discouraging all transfers.
Either way, though, there’s inherently some political content in there, which is unfortunate in some sense.
I think that pie-cutting is usually negative-sum, because of diminishing returns and transaction costs. So, if you could make utilitarianism into a voting system it would at least ameliorate the problem (ofc we can’t easily do that because of dishonesty). However, ideally what we probably want is not utilitarianism but something like a bargaining solution. Moreover, in practice we don’t know the utility functions, so we should assume some prior distribution over possible utility functions and choose the voting system that minimizes some kind of expected regret.
Right, very much agreed. The thing I was trying to convey was the difference between utilitarianism and a bargaining solution.