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Quadratic Voting (2014)

ericposner.com

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Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#81

Post by eridius »

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #11
eridius wrote: post #3

Just reading the linked summary (and not the paper itself), it seems like this doesn't take wealth disparity into account. If the cost for your votes is the square of the votes you want to cast, then that means people with a lot of money can trivially buy significantly more votes than people with very little money, even if they don't necessarily care more about the issue than the people with very little money. It see…

The cost per vote increases quadratically. If the first vote costs $1, then buying one million votes would cost one trillion dollars. If there are 50 million voters, then this trillion dollars would be distributed among them: $200,000 each. It would be extremely difficult to buy massive numbers of votes without paying hugely to the rest of the electorate.

It would be extremely difficult for one single person to do this. But we're talking about a wealthy minority, not a wealthy individual. If 25% of the population is significantly wealthier than the other 75%, does that mean the 25% should be able to pay on average 9x more than the 75% in order to get their way on an issue?

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#84

Post by glenweyl »

jmckib wrote: post #76
glenweyl wrote: post #22

The equity issues you all are raising are very important, but death with in detail here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956 . The simplest solution is just to use an artificial currency that everyone is given equal amounts of but can spread over the decisions most important to them. In this piece with Rory Sutherland we discuss this: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9512322/humans-are-doing…

Hi Glen, I mentioned this in another comment, but copying here because I'd like to hear your thoughts on it: > If enough people are participating in a vote, then the cost of voting (e.g., research + going to polling station) outweighs the benefit (possibility of changing the outcome). The cost of voting is roughly fixed, while the benefit decreases rapidly as the number of participants grows. Does quadratic voting ad…

Fantastic question. QV does not really address this much; at a quantitative level you are right that it reduces the problem a bit, but you can't beat those asymptotic properties you highlight. The right solution is representative bodies (or random samples). Great work on this by Jerry Green and Jean-Jacques Laffont: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01718517?LI=tru... If you make the set of deciders smaller this starts to go away. This is arguably the fundamental justification for representative rather than direct democracy. There is a nice property we believe QV has that we (myself and Richard Zeckhauser) are working to prove which is that if you have representatives elected via QV and then those representatives use QV to vote you get efficiency in a hierarchical fashion. So while I don't think QV directly solves this issue, I think it fits nicely into a broader system that does.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#85

Post by glenweyl »

kybernetikos wrote: post #60
cwp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, we already have the tyranny of the wealthy. The Tullock paradox is basically that the cost of lobbying is dwarfed by the returns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullock_paradox I'm still getting my head around it, but it seems that Quadratic Voting would actually increase what wealthy people pay to influence public policy. Edit: Just as an example, the largest "outside money" spender in the 2012 election…

> spent about $57M. I have no idea how many votes they were able to get for that money. With Quadratic Voting, they'd get 7,550. Doesn't that make it seem likely that they would prefer to continue with their current strategy rather than use the money to buy votes then? It seems likely that they ended up with more than 7550 votes for their 57M, especially considering that 7550 votes would be a smaller proportion of to…

This is a great point. We address it in great depth in the paper with Posner, Voting Squared (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956). QV helps here, a lot we hope, because most current expenditure on advertising is useful because it targets very indifferent swing voters who feel a duty to vote but do not care one way or the other. They can easily be swayed by noisy and wasteful advertising. But under QV they would not matter much as they would never cast more than a very small vote in either direction. On the other hand persuading those who really know an issue to feel a bit more strongly or less strongly would have a lot of value. This would make the sort of public discourse that was encouraged much more intelligent and mature, like investigative reports rather than slanderous or vacuous ad copy.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#86

Post by glenweyl »

tomrod wrote: post #57
glenweyl wrote: post #22

The equity issues you all are raising are very important, but death with in detail here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956 . The simplest solution is just to use an artificial currency that everyone is given equal amounts of but can spread over the decisions most important to them. In this piece with Rory Sutherland we discuss this: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9512322/humans-are-doing…

Glen good to see you around HN. One question that comes to mind is whether quadratic voting is the best improvement. I look forward to giving this a read.

What Lalley and I (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531) prove is that QV is provably the only system of vote pricing that gives you efficiency always, so in some sense it is the best possible improvement, at least the best one that is robust. In more narrow circumstances in finite populations you can do better probably, but it requires a fair bit of detailed knowledge of the situation and a lot of complexity.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#87

Post by glenweyl »

eridius wrote: post #80
tlholaday wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper has examples with dollar amounts starting around page 30. If ten thousand poor people buy one vote each for $1, the wealthy would-be tyrant needs to buy 10,001 votes to win, at a cost of $100,020,001. If the tyrant goes ahead and does this, after the election all the poor people will receive $10,001 each.

Two wealthy would-be tyrants taking the same position on a view would only require a combination of 10,001 votes, at a combined cost of $50,010,001. And it only goes down as more wealthy people decide to vote in the same way. It also seems really quite repugnant to tell people "your vote was overruled by one wealthy person, but it's ok because here's some money!" Why should being given some money automatically be ass…

But it only grows with the square root of the number of wealthy individuals. See the paper with Posner; we go through many such calculations: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#88

Post by pas »

glenweyl wrote: post #87
eridius wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two wealthy would-be tyrants taking the same position on a view would only require a combination of 10,001 votes, at a combined cost of $50,010,001. And it only goes down as more wealthy people decide to vote in the same way. It also seems really quite repugnant to tell people "your vote was overruled by one wealthy person, but it's ok because here's some money!" Why should being given some money automatically be ass…

But it only grows with the square root of the number of wealthy individuals. See the paper with Posner; we go through many such calculations: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956

A bit offtopic, but what's your (or the field's) take on buying/bribing/bullying voters?

Even if 10 000 poor person just needs to amass 10K USD, a sufficiently brazen party can just organize for 10 000 other easily mobilized people to vote against the other poor folk. (A common theme around the smaller villages here is the election day free meals, or course the place in full party colors to remind the people who to thank for.) Or is this not so common/significant in practice?)

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#89

Post by glenweyl »

pas on vote buying, linear vote buying is bad according to the same theory that predicts QV is good. The only equilibrium under linear vote buying is that the single most intense (or wealthiest) individual has her way at everyone else's expense. This intuition seems to underly much of the discussion here, but only applies when vote buying is linear. The logic, as cwp pointed out, is Tullock's. So while QV is much better than 1-person-1-vote, linear vote buying is worse than either.
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