>Intuitive expectations are not the same as empirical data. Sure, and I can't criticize the model with any certainty, or make my own firm claims, without doing

>Intuitive expectations are not the same as empirical data. Sure, and I can't criticize the model with any certainty, or make my own firm claims, without doing modelling myself. But looking for concerns is fine. I can't say the model is wrong in this aspect even though it looks odd. However, I can think of alternative models which would definitely have the opposite result. (For example, squared distance as utility.) >Of course there is. The ideal would be a model that is exactly like real life. Practical considerations make this impossible. Validation of a model by comparing to reality only works for small subsets of voting theory at the moment, and weakly so. A complete model like this one has no hope. And if comparison to reality is the goal, I can already see gaps where it diverges from the best-known theory, by omission of features. So taste is important. I have my own preferences about what features are important, which others will disagree with. These preferences will be non-falsifiable for at least 50 years while we wait for experiments to catch up. For example, I assume you mean affine scaling of utility into the [0, 1] range when you say "Normalization of sincere utilities". But we might add to each election a candidate whose goal is to nuke the country itself. His utility is massively negative for every voter. However, it isn't to my taste for this candidate's presence to distort "honest" votes; I'd rather there be some clamping at the ends. So even this "obvious" choice is not canonical. >Be specific. It just sounds like you don't understand how it was done. Yes, that's the problem. I shouldn't have to go through code to understand necessary things. An expert in the field should be able to follow along by reading the paper. Although, this is not a paper, so holding it up to that standard is unfair. But the gaps in what I can figure out make the results non-interpretable in some of the aspects I most care about. I think one of the results you most care about, from the model, is that Approval measures better than ranked choice. I think that's still a fair conclusion to arrive at.