Current mood:	creative
Current music:	Kiss Of Death - New Order
Entry tags:	economics, geeky, politics

Generalizing the commonalities between auctions and elections
It struck me today that an election isn't all that different from an auction so I tried to see how many commonalities I could factor out.

An election typically involves a number of entities who usually (but not necessarily) have an equal number of votes and a (usually smaller) number of candidates vying for a smaller number (frequently just one) of winning spots. The voters try to influence the outcome of the election by casting votes in favour of candidates and the candidate(s) with the most votes win(s).

An auction typically involves a number of entities who have varying quantities of resources (usually money) and a number of items (frequently just one) for which the entities iteratively place monotonically increasing competing bids until none of the bidders wishes to raise their standing bid. At that point, the available items are awarded to the highest bidders.

In both situations, there are a number of participants using scarce resources (votes or money) to determine the subset of competing options (candidates or buyers) that gets selected from the available pool. One potential difference is that votes are usually not reusable but money is.

Variants of the typical processes (e.g. Dutch auctions or instant runoff elections) may introduce other discrepancies into this generalization.