The River Method
Computer Science and Game Theory
2025-04-22 v1
Abstract
We introduce River, a novel Condorcet-consistent voting method that is based on pairwise majority margins and can be seen as a simplified variation of Tideman's Ranked Pairs method. River is simple to explain, simple to compute even 'by hand', and gives rise to an easy-to-interpret certificate in the form of a directed tree. Like Ranked Pairs and Schulze's Beat Path method, River is a refinement of the Split Cycle method and shares with those many desirable properties, including independence of clones. Unlike the other three methods, River satisfies a strong form of resistance to agenda-manipulation that is known as independence of Pareto-dominated alternatives.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.14195,
title = {The River Method},
author = {Michelle Döring and Markus Brill and Jobst Heitzig},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.14195},
year = {2025}
}