Nobelist Ken Arrow now endorses Score Voting

This website previously had said that "Arrow didn't like range voting" (also known as score voting). And, unfortunately, there were various quotes by Arrow and/or his former student (also a Nobel prize 3-way co-winner!) Eric Maskin that we could use to support that claim... some of them, especially by Maskin, were in my opinion embarrassingly wrong. [For example, Maskin once contradicted Arrow's statement (1) below.]

However, it gratifyingly appears that Arrow has changed his mind. This audio interview of Arrow by the Center For Election Science (you can read our partial text transcript), dated 6 October 2012, was pointed out to me by "omegatron":

Link to listen to audio:    https://electology.org/podcasts/2012-10-06_kenneth_arrow

In this interview Arrow correctly says that (1) his Impossibility Theorem doesn't apply to range-voting-type systems, and (2) those provide more information than ranked systems. He then says (3) he thinks a score system with "three or four classes" is "probably the best" single-winner voting method:

Dr. Arrow: Well, I'm a little inclined to think that score systems where you categorize in maybe three or four classes probably (in spite of what I said about manipulation) is probably the best.

So I think Approval Voting is a little too coarse. I think if you had three or four candidates the incentives for this would be much less if you had three or four classes.

Dr. Arrow: I think one of them is the question of more information. And scoring methods are a way of getting more information.


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