Speaker:     Michael Fowlie and Mark C. Wilson
Affiliation: The University of Auckland
Title:       Electoral engineering through simulation
Date:        Tuesday, 25 Sep 2012
Time:        4:00 pm
Location:    Room 5115, Owen Glenn Building

We report on recent and ongoing work to optimize electoral system parameters (e.g., party vote threshold for MMP) with respect to the competing criteria of decisiveness/governability and proportionality/fairness of parliament. This uses both real data (hard to obtain) and extensive simulation with artificially generated societies. Models for the latter are also hard to find, and we solicit audience help. Some interesting computational issues arise.

This forms the mandatory public talk for Michael’s CS380 project.

Everyone welcome!