Monte Carlo simulations independently performed by Warren Smith and Jameson Quinn generally find that approval voting has higher VSE than instant-runoff voting, and that both approval voting and instant-runoff voting have much higher VSE than plurality voting.
A priori, I think this could end up being quite sensitive to the distributions of votes they used. Did they choose them based on surveys/​polls of voter preferences?
A variety of utility distribution models were tried, and it turned out not to matter very much.
The simulations by N. Tideman had methodological flaws and didn’t measure the right thing, thus being approximately as useful as a random coin flip in this mathematician’s view.
A priori, I think this could end up being quite sensitive to the distributions of votes they used. Did they choose them based on surveys/​polls of voter preferences?
A variety of utility distribution models were tried, and it turned out not to matter very much.
The simulations by N. Tideman had methodological flaws and didn’t measure the right thing, thus being approximately as useful as a random coin flip in this mathematician’s view.
Yeah, see my reply to Tobias.