Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Winner Takes All

This post on Stumbling and Mumbling, about the recent X-Factor result, highlights problems with a Winner Takes All system. The problem also applies to politics, as noted in the comments there.

Lottery-voting is, in a sense, winner takes all because whoever has their vote drawn gets 100% their way. This is because although I believe compromise is often possible, I don't think it's normally easy to engineer through mechanical processes. Rather, I take the other route out, introducing some randomness. If everyone knows that they have a chance, then this should be incentive for them - both (in this case) to vote responsibly and engage in persuading others.

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