Shireroth

I'm unhappy with the current connection between the economy and Landsraad votes. Oh, it's simple and convenient, that's good. It'd even make sense in a place like Babkha, which is more concerned with building a simulacrum of a nation than a nation, where you can explain the system with vague handwaving about investments and political capital. Thing is, we're not Babkha. We're here to run a nation - a small one, maybe, but a real one. And I want to have a real economy in our real nation.

The current voting system makes no sense as part of a real economy. It acts as a government-mandated incentive to hoard money. This is a well-known problem that other nations with similar systems have also acknowledged. Governments don't incentivise hoarding. They should incentivise *investment* and *work*. Besides, in a more complex economy the voting system would auctally be essentially impossible, given the problems with quickly and accurately assessing equity - and we want to eventually make the economy more complex and rich, don't we?

The obvious way to get the money moving is to require dukes to actually pay to get legislation passed. I've spent a little while working this out, and it seems a simple English auction would be more than good enough as a system. Dukes call their bids and votes, and keep calling them until the end of the voting period. At the end, the Praetor adds up the highest bids of each of the dukes, announces the winner, and requests the winning bidders to pay the prices they bid. That way we get price discovery (it's unlikely you'll know the value you're willing to put on a bill before you find someone who disagrees with you on whether it should pass), a lot of fun voting intrigue and hijinks, and an easily determined price for the winners to pay (their highest/latest bid, obviously).

The one really major problem with this system that I can see is sniping. Say everyone in the Landsraad is against a bill except one duke who's for it. Once everyone's placed a small bid against it (presumably 0), he could come in right at the end of the voting period and bid for the bill. I'd like to avoid any informal "let the Praetor sort it out" kind of solutions here - the Praetor's not supposed to have the kind of power over whether bills pass or not that being able to *always* snipe them would give him. I mean, we trust the Praetor, but not so much as to make him the only one whose vote in the Landsraad actually counts .

There's several solutions we *could* use, though. We could try a candle auction - I could easily put together a script to place a "Voting's closed now" message in a Landsraad thread at a certain time, with some random fudge about exactly when that time is. Or, we could strike a balance between filibusterability and sniping resistance by making each bid when there's less than a day of the bidding period left extend the period with one more day, up to a maximum of, say, one week (so, up to three extensions). I'm afraid a system like that would still be quite snipeable, though...

What say you guys?

I have a lot of trouble with the present voting system, as is well known. I've not decreed it out of existance, simply because it was such a lot of work to get it set up, and , believe it or not, I don't do things based on random dissatisfaction.

Well, not very often.

Well, not as Kaiser, anyway.

I think the present system sucks, and support research into alternatives.

The one other problem I see with an auction is that many Dukes would not spend the money at all, the system would grind to a halt, leaving the Kaiser to decree most needed stuff.

Eh, what's so bad about that?

There's no reason to reject a bid of 0 erb

Seriously, there isn't. Make it so that if everyone who's voting votes aye with 0 erb, it passes, if someone votes nay with 0 erb, it doesn't. It's kind of like a funny kind of real algebra with a negative zero, with 0 + (-0) = (-0). And if everybody's voting nay 0 and doesn't care to raise their bid, you can still get it passed by voting aye 1.

Bottom end bids aren't going to be difficult to work out. It's the controversial ones that people will feel strongly and bid high about that will bring in the wackiness

And now, a motivating example!

<Elwynn> Hi guys, here's a bill for y'all to vote on. *presents bill* As you can see it's all nice and uncontroversial.
<Elwynn> Aye 0 erb
<Brookshire> Aye 0 erb
<Yardistan> Aye 0 erb
<Yardistan> Hey, wait! On a closer reading, this bill will force the YAC to release all of their annexed holdings! But we're still lazy so we'll vote Nay 0 erb, so the bill won't pass with the current votes.
<Elwynn> Aye 10 erb
<Yardistan> Nay 250 erb
<Elwynn> Aye 300 erb
<Yardistan> Help! Help! I'm being repressed! Nay 350 erb!
<Brookshire> LOL, deal with it, stupid anarchists
<Elwynn> Aye 400 erb
<Kildare> We will come to your help! Nay 100 erb!
* Elwynn waits until almost the end of the voting period
<Elwynn> SNEAK ATTACK! Aye 451 erb!
<Praetor> Oh hi, I extended your voting period
<Straylight> Uh, I guess we'll chip in Nay 2 erb.
<Elwynn> OK, I'm bored. You win, have fun paying your erb!



... which... now that I think of it... is a good point I didn't notice before writing that example: You can submit a bill that another duchy will find unacceptable and raise the bid in order to force them to waste their money getting it rejected.

* thinks *

Ah! The obvious solution: Everyone pays their highest bid whether they won or lost . That way you can drain at most, uhh, about 0.01 erb per bill, which oughtn't be much of a problem. Yeah, the everyone-pays rule is kind of rarely used in actual auctions, but I think it makes sense in this situation. Opinions?

Very interesting. I had another alternative I was toying with if people are interested (again, I'm not sure what works best in Shireroth).

Instead of auctioning for particular bills, you buy voting power. Either have a closed system, where you issue 100 "voting stocks" and once they're all bought, people have to pay more money to eachother to get voting power ... or, you just say "Right, 1 vote is 10 erb." or something, and allowing people to buy votes infinitely (a very lucrative money source for the Crown). That is, say the current holdings was B 500 E 400 K 400 S 500 Y 100. If Kildare knew they were about to put in a bill that Straylight and Brookshire wouldn't like, but Elwynn would, they might go and spend another 2000 erb to buy 200 more votes. Then they merely need to convince Yardistan. That way, you don't have to deal with other people not being willing to sell votes for any amount; and those who aren't continually buying votes find their voting power deflated, which is a great way to avoid what we currently have ... a couple citizens who were there at the start and so got 2000 added to their Duchy, but are no longer active.

Of course, that raises the question of whether you should be able to buy more votes in the middle of voting (because sometimes you'll only realise you want to in the middle) but I guess if a bill fails, you can always buy more votes and then re-submit it, so we might as well not allow newly bought votes to influence the current vote.

Might be simpler than your auction method and avoid sniping, though as an economist the "everyone paying their bid even if they lose" is a fun experiment ...

I voice tentative support for this pending sleep.

(One duke, one vote!)

Kaiser Loki III wrote: (One duke, one vote!)

I like Ari's Everyone pays option. Then the government can hand out more money... It gets the money movie again...

but does it really solve the hoarding problem? Is this just the Duke's money? (That I like)

OK. I've been thinking about this a little bit more...

Andreas: Yours is a very decent solution for getting the money moving, and that's good, but it's not the only thing that I want from the system. The Landsraad often manages to develop controversy and disagreement - what I want is for the dukes to pay up, so we'll know just how much they're willing to give up for each bill. Price discovery, in other words.

I'm working on an idea that might... might work... I'll get back to you on it after the election's over and all that...

Look forward to it. Novatainia wouldn't let me try buying votes there (someone's too Socialist) so it'd be nice to try that or auction here ...

YES! SOCIALISM! NOVATAINIA ISN'T THAT BAD NOW!

I'm being owned big time by game theory here. This might take a couple more days.

Game Theory! I love Game Theory! But I don't get to study it again till third year ....

OK, well, I don't think I can make it work. Whichever way I try to iron out the kinks they still appear somewhere. Every system that would work decently requires some kind of a restriction that I really don't want to impose upon the Landsraad.

If we force bids to keep rising, we can use any number of systems, including just a good old English auction. However, we can't really do that. It's expected and natural in the Landsraad that people's valuation of a bill changes with time - PRH, people even change their votes all the time.

If we force all bids to be secret, we could use a Vickrey auction or some derivation thereof. However, we can't really do that, because it would break with collusion, and wouldn't support price discovery anyway. And, oh, it would make all bids secret .

If we try to toss both of those restrictions and use a first-price auction or indeed any auction where the winners pay more than the losers do, we run the risk of allowing "malicious" bills that people have to spend money on to ensure they don't pass the Landsraad.

If we try to toss both of those restrictions and use a second-price or all-pay auction, it seems the auctions will either devolve into cycles, or end up with the dominant strategy being exactly equal to the old system - work things out so that you use all of the money you're allowed to bid to get a bill passed, and then not pay any of it.


I still think that this particular economy is somewhat fun, though, and it's well worth it to keep it connected to the Landsraad. How about we kill those big numbers and decimals currently involved in Landsraad votes, and just sell units of voting power for, say, two thousand erb? I'm thinking of this as a replacement for the tax system...

As you saw, I posted a bit on this in Minitrade. I think 2000 is too much (merely because that means one extra vote makes a huge difference). I proposed 10 erb each. That may well be too low. I wouldn't go above 100 though. You want it high enough people don't buy frivolously, but low enough that enough get out there that buying another 5 doesn't totally change the balance of power.

Wait.. you have to buy your vote?

wait... Every month you have to buy voting power 1000 per vote..

no. still inherently has the problem of just encouraging the amassing of wealth. We need a real non-vote driven economy.

What if both having AND spending money gained you votes/privileges in shireroth? It wasn't just what you could buy from the government that gained you things, but what you spent in the economy as a whole? This way people would want to both spend and earn money.

Dukes can buy their vote in the LAndsraad for 1000 per month. Citizens could buy certain titles and status from the government, and each other. By spending a certain amount of money on non-government things in a month you get X reward, title, status..etc.

The ability to buy and sell titles and stuff might actually go somewhere. People like fancy titles and stuff in their sigs. Further, by rewarding spending it encourages the movement of money between citizens.

In my system you didn't have to buy every month or anything, your votes just stayed .... and, having done several other economies, I'm of the opinion that a vote based economy actually encourages more activity than a non-vote based economy ...

Erik Mortis wrote:What if both having AND spending money gained you votes/privileges in shireroth? It wasn't just what you could buy from the government that gained you things, but what you spent in the economy as a whole? This way people would want to both spend and earn money.

So program in some function to measure erb-flux per duchy?

It may just be me, but I can see that being cheated so easily.

Indeed. It was just an out there idea.

Perhaps only measuring erb that comes into and goes out of the duchy, then? Although, even that could be broken...

Erik Mortis wrote:Dukes can buy their vote in the LAndsraad for 1000 per month. Citizens could buy certain titles and status from the government, and each other. By spending a certain amount of money on non-government things in a month you get X reward, title, status..etc.

The ability to buy and sell titles and stuff might actually go somewhere. People like fancy titles and stuff in their sigs. Further, by rewarding spending it encourages the movement of money between citizens.

I am of the firm belief that titles should be given for service to the nation, not for money. If everyone buys titles, the titles are meaningless.

Mike Fors wrote:If everyone buys titles, the titles are meaningless.

That's why we make 'em so damned expensive, old boy, so they can't be bought by everyone.

I'm not talking about Baron, Duke or Kaiser. We'd have to make up some new titles and status' and stuff.

Titles are easy. Powers, a little harder. I mean, it's not hard to make a richlist. From there, it's one step away to make a "biggest transactor list" (we'd use MAD from 0, not MSE, easier to understand)
And that could be a very fun idea. But its something that adds to the economy and not, as far as its yet discussed, something that could be the primary basis for it.