Friday, October 4, 2019

Eric Maskin on Rank Choice Voting (RCV) in Massachusetts and beyond

Eric Maskin, the Harvard University Professor and Nobel laureate in Economics, gave two talks at Stanford this week.  The first was the joint Economics/GSB economic theory seminar, in which he talked about his theoretical work on Condorcet voting and Borda count voting, two different voting systems in which voters record a ranking of candidates (rather than voting for a single candidate).  His work leads him to think that these two voting systems have some properties that recommend them to democracies.

His second talk was a political meeting, at the home of Susan Athey and Guido Imbens, in support of the Massachusetts Ranked-Choice Voting Initiative (2020)#.
He argues that, although in an ideal world he'd prefer Condorcet voting, he thinks that Ranked Choice Voting is a pretty good alternative, that has a greater chance of being adopted, and that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Voting is complicated, and Arrow's theorem assures us that no voting system is perfect, but I concluded the evening by making a modest contribution to the RCV initiative in Massachusetts, since RCV reduces the problems caused when multiple similar candidates split the vote in our current system of plurality voting.



Eric Maskin explains Rank Choice Voting

#the initiative:
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See my earlier post:

Monday, September 30, 2019

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