Week 7: Finalizing and Running the Simulation

Hello all, and welcome back. All my previous work has been leading up to this: the simulation. This week, I was able to finish it, meaning that I will soon have the data needed to move forward in my project. In this blog, I will explain the design of the simulation.

The first step of the simulation is to generate a complete preference profile using the spatial generation model that I described in week 5. These profiles are generated with a set of 3 variables: number of candidates, number of voters, and number of dimensions. Once that profile is generated with the set of variables, it is probabilistically truncated using the function developed last week. As described previously, this is done to mimic realistic voting patterns, which aligns with the goal of my project.

The next step is to find the “true” winner for each voting system. The “true” winner is the candidate that wins when all preferences are expressed. This “true” winner will be used as the basis on which to judge how each voting system performs under forced ballot truncation.

Once the “true” winners are found for each system, all the ballots are uniformly truncated by 1 candidate (refer to last week’s blog if you want more information). New winners are then calculated using the profiles with the truncated ballots and those winners are compared to the “true” winner. It is then recorded whether the “true” winner and new winner match, and then the ballots are truncated once again and the process repeats until all the ballots are truncated to 1 candidate. This entire process is then repeated 10,000 times for the same set of variables: generating a preference of profile, calculating the “true” winner, truncating the ballots, and comparing the winners.This larger process is repeated for each permutation of variables, which results in 84 iterations, meaning that 840,000 total preference profiles were generated while collecting data for this project. All of this data is now recorded in a spreadsheet, which I will start analyzing next week. See you then!