[ClayShentrup]

No. Utility is not about ordering. E.g. suppose you prefer X over Y over Z, and can have a guarantee of Y, or a 50/50 probability of X or Z. If your preference for Y is greater than the average of X and Z, then you would want to take Y. If Y is less than that average, then you want the lottery.

You can arbitrarily change the 50/50 probability to e.g. 40/60 or what have you, to make it equally preferable to any guaranteed item.

[logicchop]

Yes, we know that preference involves more than ordering and that "strengths" are relevant to decision making. We know this because it explains an obvious empirical matter, that there are scenarios like the one you cite where we prefer X over Y, but end up choosing Y over X. Not a puzzle; not a paradox; how it is. And of course the way we tease out the "strength" of your preference involves, e.g., looking at how your choice varies between counterfactual scenarios involving different probabilities.

But the question is whether a "score" given by a voter on a ballot indicates anything psychologically interesting, and, more importantly, whether it indicates anything relevant to the "judicious" selection of a candidate. It seems to me that, empirically, the only meaning we can _seriously_ assign to a "score" on a ballot is a relative-scoring-as-indicative-of-relative-preference. I don't know how "10 to A, 20 to B" could indicate anything beyond the simple fact that the voter prefers B to A. And surely my "10 to A, 20 to B" needn't have the same meaning as your "10 to A, 20 to B" -- I think all we can really say is that we both prefer B to A. What else?

Now, you might want to try to interpret these "scores" as something like a hypothetical question put to the voter about how much they might pay to have this-or-that person elected; but if you know anything about self-reports of this kind about hypothetical scenarios, you know that people are horribly inaccurate (either intentionally or not), and that the setup is contrived. Serious measures of preferences involve actual stakes, markets, etc. Good luck with that here.

[ClayShentrup]

> I don't know how "10 to A, 20 to B" could indicate anything beyond the simple fact that the voter prefers B to A.

Scores are actual utilities with added loss, from:

  - ignorance    
  - normalization    
  - rounding error    
  - tactical voting

The way you measure the combined impact of that loss is with Bayesian regret. http://ScoreVoting.net/BayRegsFig.html

So those scores HAVE meaning. That meaning is muddied by the aforementioned loss, but it is lunacy to say it only "could indicate anything beyond the simple fact that the voter prefers B to A".

[_dps]

You are implicitly presuming an expected utility framework (more generally, that people rank outcome distributions based solely on their long run central tendencies).

This isn't the case (or even uniquely formalizable) in base (non-e.u.) utility theory which requires choice-order preservation under arbitrary monotonic transformations of the scoring function. Expectation ordering is not necessarily preserved under such transformations.

E.U. is a common paradigm because it is a useful approximation and allows numerical calculations but it is not all (or even, the core) of utility theory except in very limited circumstances (e.g. purely monetary payoffs and linear utility of money).

[ClayShentrup]

> You are implicitly presuming an expected utility framework

This isn't an assumption. Organisms have specifically evolved to maximize the expected number of copies of their genes they make. Or rather, _genes_ have specifically survived in proportion to their expected impact on the number of copies of themselves they make, and therefore we are to a very close approximation utility maximizers.

> ..linear utility of money

Utility is approximately log(money).

A caveat here is that certain decisions themselves are costly (particularly in terms of the most precious resource: time) and hence we can sometimes make clearly "irrational" choices because the expected utility of spending more time choosing was lower than the expected utility of making the more optimal choice. This leads to apparent paradoxes like the Allais Paradox.

Here's some background on utility theory. http://scorevoting.net/UtilFoundns.html