The question comes from this math exchange post.
Imagine a system where people have to vote on something from a scale of 0-10 (maybe a movie or a song).
If people vote exactly what their true preferences are, the average of all the votes will trivially be equal to the average preference.
But what if some people vote with the intention of moving the current average towards their preference. This means that every person's vote will not necessarily be equal to their true preference. Do votes now help us consistently (a loose usage of the term from actual econometrics) estimate preferences? In what situations is this true or false?
This repo conducts some simple simulations to get insights into this.