washingtonpost.com: Sebastian Mallaby - A Nobel Laureate's Primary

washingtonpost.com: Sebastian Mallaby - A Nobel Laureate's Primary

"Just like badly designed auctions, the primaries encourage 'strategic' behavior that conceals true preferences.... What elections ought to do is discover which candidate would beat each of the other candidates in head-to-head matchups. Eric Maskin, one of last year's Nobel laureates for mechanism design, will suggest how a better system could do that in a lecture Thursday at Georgetown University. Maskin's argument is that voters should list candidates in order of preference, so we wouldn't have to guess whether Clinton would have beaten Obama in a two-person contest."