I may be missing something, but it seems as though QV is associating how passionate a party (specifically a minority) is about a topic with the importance that their view be equally represented against an apathetic opposition. The problem inherent to this is lack of education of topics that will be well know to a minority party but unknown to a majority. The majorities ignorance is not the same as not caring, and the impetus to gain knowledge may not always be clear. Beyond this its seems like minority opinions no matter how impassioned should not become the center of debate merely because they have spent more money. The act of voting involves far more than the act itself as evidenced by the prolonged campaign periods in the US. The national attention span is short and is already dominated by the extreme and the rich.
Quadratic Voting (2014)
91–100 of 156 posts
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 smalle…
Thanks for answering my question! I hadn't thought of using random samples. So maybe a good solution is QV for representatives, with only a small random sample of the population being able to vote. The representatives should also use QV, of course.
I just read a big chunk of your paper "Voting Squared: Quadratic Voting in Democratic Politics", and I really enjoyed it. For a long time I've wanted to do an open source project related to characterizing an optimal government, or at least simulating the outcomes you could expect from different types of governments. If you know of a useful way to go about doing this I'd love to hear it.
By the way, I reside in a coliving space with 50+ people, and we've struggled with voting on certain issues that minority groups feel strongly about. I will definitely be suggesting QV!
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#93I'm interested to know what the authors think about the problem that could be called vote splitting or support buying, which would be akin to vote buying in one-person-one-vote system. This seems particularly relevant because, unlike most systems, buying the support of small numbers of voters could be useful.
Consider the case given elsewhere in this thread of 10,000 voters willing to pay only $1 against a proposal, and a single supporter. That supporter would need to pay over $100m for the measure to pass, giving each person against it at least $10,000.
Now suppose that person takes their $100m, and only purchases $25m worth of votes. They find someone else, and transfer $35m to them with the agreement that the person will buy $25m in votes, and keep the remaining $10m. A person who is only willing to vote $1 against a measure is unlikely to turn down such a deal, but it saves the lone supporter $40m.
It seems like it would be very difficult to police this, as the transfers would not necessarily need to be direct. For example, verbal agreements between the one wealthy, lone supporter and nine opponents that those opponents would get contracts in the future worth $1m each would be hard to notice, but would save the supporter $90m. An employer could give bonuses vaguely tied to the success or failure of a measure, and so on. And in all of these cases, the savings are so extreme that vast amounts could be spent hiding the fraud.
Even without buying the votes of opponents, it can be very beneficial for wealthy, motivated supporters to transfer money for voting to poorer or less motivated supporters, to move closer to the optimal funds arrangement (all amounts equal). In some cases, this could be almost indistinguishable from legitimate behavior, and would lead to all sorts of claims: is a philanthropist giving money to the poor to help them live, or to support her social agenda?
In a one-person-one-vote system, buying the votes of individuals requires mass fraud to have an impact. In QV, however, every doubling in size of a group that votes optimally doubles the number of votes they can buy at the same total cost. Thus it seems like small, motivated groups have a very, very large motivation toward fraud, while that fraud could take place at an extremely small level that would be difficult to detect. This doesn't even need to be organized: it makes sense for even a single motivated supporter to go out on their own and split their vote with one other person, perhaps a close friend of theirs.
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#94I don't get it. So I can randomly vote with my single vote for all the causes and get increased votes back (since somebody else may buy additional votes and the total sum for redistribution will be larger than individuals count). Or not?
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not an equilibrium; the down-winders would not vote unless they thought that vote mattered. In any case we have a nominating process to avoid this sort of manipulation; see http://ssrn.com/abstract=2321904 or http://ssrn.com/abstract=2343956 .
My point is: it is a bad situation, equilibrium or not. And some down-winders have to vote if the factory votes a little bit each time. Or even if the factory threatens to vote (and then doesn't). If all the magic is in the nominating process- then we really don't need the voting mechanism.
If it's not an equilibrium then it can't happen! That doesn't make the claim foolproof or anything-- maybe it's not actually an equilibrium for one reason or another we didn't foresee, but the phrase "it is a bad situation, equilibrium or not" is nonsensical.
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
USA and Australia are very different politically. I have no idea what you mean by "the laws of herders from thousands of years ago", but if I venture a guess I'd assume you refer to the Judeo-Christian principles. That ye olde "do not murder", "do not steal", "do not perjury" stuff. If so, I'm pretty sure, unless I missed some recent developments, that both USA and Australia are still on board with enforcing those. A…
> the Judeo-Christian principles It may shock you to learn that legal systems other than the Mosaic law have that "don't kill or steal" stuff. I was thinking of the more tasteless parts of Leviticus. In fact it was worked out and written down thousands of years before anyone was thinking about leaving Egypt. Another name for it is "Judeo-Greco-Persian-Roman-Christian-Celtic principles", given the roots of the western…
> legal systems other than the Mosaic law have that "don't kill or steal" stuff.
It wouldn't shock me, but it so happened one that is in force in US and Australia draws largely from Christian law and moral traditions, which borrows a lot from Judaic tradition (not only, Roman too, some Celtic, very little Persian as far as I know). In other countries, it is different, but in those two specific ones that's where the roots are, that's just history.
> Australia is one of the less-worse governed countries in the world over the past 30 years.
How do you know that? Australia doesn't have the same problems the US has, by many dimensions, and is very different geographically, population-wise, traditionally and so on. How you would even compare the governance, on which basis?
> Boring but sometimes effective.
Effective doing what? I don't know much about Australian politics, I admit, but I know Australia has no freedom of speech - people were imprisoned or otherwise sanctioned by government for merely expressing various political positions. Or this one: https://wikileaks.org/aus-suppression-order/. But maybe the government is efficient doing something else than protecting basic rights - but what?
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#97I still prefer approval voting over it: http://www.electology.org/#!approval-voting/cc04 1) elimintes the spoiler effect problem 2) most "approved"/liked candidate can win, not necessarily the most "popular" within a certain group 3) gives lesser known candidates/parties a much better chance to compete and rise up against the incumbents 4) statistically proven to be one of the voting systems with the least remorse 5)…
The non-garbled link is www.electology.org/approval-voting
> Range voting also seems to have a bigger degree of regret
No. It has the lowest regret of any commonly discussed system. http://ScoreVoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
> although it does seem to do slightly better with electing the "ideal" candidate.
Lower regret = more ideal candidate. So you just said a contradiction.
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#98The 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…
There seem to be one big issue with this voting system. It allows variable number of votes per individual but how does an individual choose how much cost to take and exactly how much to vote? I think it is a fallacy to assume that individual would set the number of votes depending on how important they think is the issue. Instead they must speculate how others would vote and optimize their cost accordingly. For example, an individual may depend on wrong information to arrive at conclusion that everyone is in agreement with him/her sentiment and decide to spend less even though they deeply care about specific outcome. Mean while a small group might be secretly conspiring and spends huge sums to win their desired outcome. I would suspect that this voting system would promote speculation based market which can be easily manipulated by either asymmetric information or incorrect information by a small group.
Another thing to think about is too many small minority groups. So for instance, assume there are N questions to vote for and for each of these questions, we have a significant minority group that deeply cares about specific outcome. At some point, because of required increased expenditure, wouldn't votes for all questions favor minority sentiment?
I think we have to understand that while there is a dark side to "tyranny-of-majority", there is an important bright side too: It shields from scenarios where small group of radicals take over the system because they deeply care about their ideas that are not good for majority.
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#99How does quadratic voting get around Arrow's Theorem?
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#100The 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…
There seem to be one big issue with this voting system. It allows variable number of votes per individual but how does an individual choose how much cost to take and exactly how much to vote? I think it is a fallacy to assume that individual would set the number of votes depending on how important they think is the issue. Instead they must speculate how others would vote and optimize their cost accordingly. For examp…
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