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CH +2+Mathematics+of+Power
CH +2+Mathematics+of+Power
CH +2+Mathematics+of+Power
A weighted voting system is any voting system in which voters are not equal in
terms of number of votes they control.
We will only consider situations, called motions, where there are only 2 choices,
which will we equate to voting yes or no.
Ex. Suppose we have a 4 person (P1,P2,P3,P4) search committee for a job opening. P1
is the head of the committee and so they control 7 votes. P 2 is second in charge and
they control 5 votes. The remaining two people each control 4 votes. Suppose that
a candidate needs 15 votes to move onto the next round of interviews.
The above terms demonstrate that just looking at how many votes a player controls
can be misleading. We are going to look at a couple of ways to determine the
“power” a player has.
Important Terms
Coalition: any grouping of one or more players that vote the same way.
Winning Coalition: a coalition that has enough votes to make a motion pass (total is
at least the quota).
Critical Players: Any player in a winning coalition that needs to vote yes for motion
to pass, in other words, with them the coalition is winning and without them it is a
losing coalition.
Winning coalitions for our example, and their critical players:
A player is a dictator if their single-player coalition is a winning coalition.
A player has veto power if they are critical in every winning coalition.
A player is a dummy if they are not critical in any winning coalition.
Determine how many times a player is a critical player. We call this number the
critical count for the player. We do this for every player and denote by B 1,B2,…
Then total these up, and call it T. Then determine the ratio B i/T and this is the
Banzhaf power index for Player i. Denote this by 𝛽 .
Pivotal Player: The player who contributes the first vote that causes a motion to
pass in a sequential coalition. Each winning sequential coalition has one and only
one pivotal player.