Beyond the Cambridge Compromise algorithm towards degressively proportional allocations

摘要

Although proportional allocation methods are well-known and widely used in the parliamentary tradition, they cannot be applied in a wide variety of cases. Such problems occur in the European Parliament, where a constitutional principle is to assure that less populous countries will not be dominated by the others, which implies that allocations have to be degressively proportional. However, under this assumption an exhaustive search of the solution space is intractable. To solve the problem, the Cambridge Compromise algorithm was proposed, which is durable, transparent, impartial to politics and unambiguous, but the allocations obtained are not degressively proportional. Therefore, we propose an allocation algorithm derived from operations research that inherits the transparency of the Cambridge Compromise and produces an unambiguous degressively proportional allocation. Hence, the paper aims at testing our alternative allocation method and comparing its outcomes during computational analysis.