Strategic nomination: Difference between revisions

The candidates in the example above form a cycle known as the [[Smith set]] - their combined presence provides conflicting information (both to the election system as well as to observers) about who the greatest candidate is. Strategic nomination, then, involves hiding this information from the voting system by excluding one of the candidates. Because of this strange relationship between the candidates and the voters, strategic nomination through this manner is doubtful as it becomes very much a question of whether the presence or absence in an election of a potential "cycle-maker" (provided one exists and can be found) can be decided by those who seek to gain from it.

 

In order to simplify the issue, academic attention sometimes focuses on a specific kind of strategic nomination: the kind that involves '''clones'''. Clones in this context are candidates such that every voter ranks them the same relative to every other candidate, i.e. two clones of each other are never both strictly separated by a third member in the preference ranking of any voter, unless that member is also a fellow clone. Trivially, the set of all candidates makes up a clone set as does every subset consisting of one candidate. It thus makes no sense to just call a candidate a clone unless it is in the context of a clone set which contains at least two elements and is a a proper subset of the set of all candidates.