Micah Cohen writes:
Our company is establishing a Hall of Fame and I am on a committee to help set it up which involved figuring out the voting system to induct a candidate. We have modeled it somewhat off of the voting for the Baseball Hall of Fame. The details in short:· Up to 40 candidates,· 600 voters· Each elector has up to 10 votes· A candidate has to have 75% of the votes to get inducted Our current projected model:· Up to 20 candidates· About 100-120 voters (lets say 100)· Each elector has up to 3 votes· A candidate has to have 75% of the votes to get inducted The last 2 points are the variables in question that we need help with: How many votes should each elector get and what percentage should the candidate have to have to get inducted? We don’t want to make it too easy and don’t want to make it too hard. Our thought is to have 2-5 people inducted per year but we want to avoid having 0, no one, inducted. We will assume that each candidate has an equal chance of being voted in so it’s not weighted at all. My initial thought was to increase the number of votes that each elector can have to the same ratio as the baseball system (10 votes for up to 40 candidates) so we could increase to up to 5 votes for the 20 candidates. Or should we keep it at 3 candidates and decrease the percent that the candidate would need? The other factor would be if there are less than 20 candidates, lets say 15, how would this all change? With all that being said, is there a way to find out what the right number of votes each elector should have and what the percentage should be? Is there a way to visually see this in a graph where we could plug in the variables to see how it would change the probability of no one being elected or how many would be elected in a year?
My reply: I have no specific ideas here but I have four general suggestions:
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To get a sense of what numbers would work for you, I recommend simulating fake data and trying out various ideas. Your results will only be as good as your fake data; still, I think this can give a lot of insight.
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No need for a fixed rule, right? I’d recommend starting with a tough threshold for getting into the hall of fame, and then if you’re getting not enough people inducted each year, you can loosen your rules. This only works in one direction: If your rules are too loose, you can’t retroactively tighten them and exclude people you’ve already honored. But if you start out too tight, it shouldn’t be hard to loosen up.
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This still leaves the question of how to set the thresholds for the very first year: if you set the bar too high at first, you could well have zero people inducted. One way you could handle this is to put the percentage threshold on a sliding scale so that if you have just 0 or 1 people passing, you lower the threshold until at least 2 people get in.
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Finally, think about the motivations of voters, strategic voting, etc. The way the rules are set up can affect how people will vote.