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Quadratic Voting (2014)

ericposner.com

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Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#121

Post by glenweyl »

mhuffman wrote: post #118
toolslive wrote: post #113

Most of the time, it's not the voting system that's the problem, it's the set of things you can vote for. Sometimes, you can vote A or B but you like neither alternative. Maybe you should be able to express your dislike too. A vote like "I don't care who gets elected, as long as it is not this specific person".

The ability to "negative vote", really should be a thing. Since the US system, in particular, is set up in a way that makes change unrealistic for the "common folk" it would be the only way I can think of for poor people to really get any disapproval across.

I completely agree. This is a crucial feature of QV with multiple alternatives. QV also has a nominating process to ensure the right things are on the ballot.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#122

Post by glenweyl »

infinity0 wrote: post #119
savanaly wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Assuming that the proofs make perfect assumptions that exactly match real life, sure. "the down-winders would not vote unless they thought that vote mattered." - this decision requires mental resources to make, and if the rational choice is too complex then many people wouldn't make it, breaking your assumptions. Is there any research that tries to model the economic cost of coming to a "rational" decision (as define…

Yes, in this paper (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2571012) I also consider the case where people make mistakes. You can study equilibrium even in models where people are not perfectly rational.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#123

Post by glenweyl »

notahacker wrote: post #120
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…

The "artificial currency" would ensure votes accurately reflect the importance an individual attaches to an issue relative to other votes , but in practice this gives significantly more "voting power" to groups which seldom participate in votes, even where it is difficult to believe the intensity of their preferences are stronger. Given a fixed budget to be used over a number of votes, an essentially apolitical perso…

I cannot completely follow this scenario, but if you can write it up as an actual equilibrium analysis I would be fascinated to see this. I have worked very hard to come up with cases where QV does worse than one-person-one-vote and have never found a case where it occurred by a significant margin. But your basic point, that allowing exchange with a broader set of goods to make sure that if all voting is more valued by people they can have more overall voting influence, is something I very much agree with and why I think that while artificial currency is an improvement over one-person-one-vote eventually using cash will be better.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#124

Post by saalweachter »

Strilanc wrote: post #19

How does this system deal with the logarithmic value of dollars, and the asymmetry in who has them? When you get ln(X) happiness from X dollars, you are sacrificing 1/X happiness per dollar spent. A billionaire buying a thousand votes is paying ln(10^9 - (10^3)^2) - ln(10^9) ~= 1 milli-utilon, but a thousandaire buying ten votes is paying ln(10^3 - 10^2) - ln(10^3) ~= 100 milli-utilons. It seems like billionaires, wh…

How would you feel about "exponential voting", which would be like quadratic voting but the cost is 2^N instead of N^2?

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#125

Post by glenweyl »

sytelus wrote: post #98
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…

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…

You are absolutely right that QV can create speculative dynamics like a market place. Almost everything about QV is similar to the market mechanism. But do you really think that there are many cases where you would prefer rationing, effectively what one-person-one-vote does, to a marketplace? Marketplaces are imperfect in all sorts of ways, but few think communism worked better. Markets have natural self-correcting features that rationing does not. While speculation can occur, it creates natural incentives for those on the opposite side to offset it. I discuss this in some quantitative detail in this paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2571012

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#126

Post by glenweyl »

goodmachine wrote: post #110

Since QV appears, on the face of it at least, to be a single-round blind auction, why would it not be vulnerable to bad signalling and consequent price distortion? As another poster commented below, all players are blindly speculating on the real price of a win. Take any vote as an example. One side announces they will pay a mighty sum (or have already marshalled a sufficiency) towards a vote Con to scare off those s…

As we prove in this paper (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2264245), a small group can never beat out a large population with an overall preference in the opposite direction in equilibrium, regardless of what they announce. The reason is that any small individual or group can never really buy very many votes. $10 billion buys only 100,000 votes. Do you think this could really deter others from voting? Now a large group could deter other from voting, but of course this can happen under one-person-one vote as well. If you think Obama is the overwhelming favorite you do not show up. But that is not really how things work out in practice and I doubt they would under QV. To begin with, the members of the large group would have no incentive to show up either. It requires assuming a very strong asymmetry across groups which will mess up any system.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#127

Post by glenweyl »

cge wrote: post #93

I'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,…

This is a great question and one of the central ones my analysis addresses (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2264245). You can read the results in details for the general guarantees, but a few observations about the scenario you describe. First, doubling group size at worst increases by a factor of the square root of two the number of votes you can buy with the same amount of money. To double the votes you buy you would have to increase aggregate expenditures by the square root of two as well. Second, I disagree that these coalitions would be stable. If you gave someone $35 million, why wouldn't they just keep the full $35 million? Under 1p1v there is no incentive to cheat on the coalition...you get to keep your money regardless. Under QV there is a huge incentive to cheat on the coalition and it could be made even larger by giving bounties for ratting out to the police, which has been extremely effective in antitrust in breaking cartels. In fact the situation is extremely analogous to antitrust. Cartels do harm market performance, but I think few of us would, as a result of them, prefer rationing over markets.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#128

Post by glenweyl »

thomasahle wrote: post #116
cge wrote: post #93

I'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,…

Exactly, if we've already created a system where buying votes is accepted, why would I buy 1000 votes for 1000^2 money, if I might as well pay 1000 uninterested people 2 money each to vote the same way as I?

Buying votes is not accepted. Using the system would be accepted, but not buying separately. Why couldn't we create a norm where buying outside the system is just as punished then as buying outside the system is now?

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#129

Post by glenweyl »

stormbrew wrote: post #106
cge wrote: post #93

I'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,…

> In a one-person-one-vote system, buying the votes of individuals requires mass fraud to have an impact. More specifically, even if you do go to the trouble of outright buying people's votes, since secret ballots are generally considered the way to go (though they haven't always been, even relatively recently), it's extraordinarily difficult to have confidence in the value of your 'purchase' because you have no way…

We are actively working on the identifiability issue; Ron Rivest (of RSA encryption) is writing a paper for a conference on the topic trying to solve this: http://bfi.uchicago.edu/events/quadratic-voting-and-public-g...

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#130

Post by glenweyl »

thomasahle wrote: post #117
Strilanc wrote: post #19

How does this system deal with the logarithmic value of dollars, and the asymmetry in who has them? When you get ln(X) happiness from X dollars, you are sacrificing 1/X happiness per dollar spent. A billionaire buying a thousand votes is paying ln(10^9 - (10^3)^2) - ln(10^9) ~= 1 milli-utilon, but a thousandaire buying ten votes is paying ln(10^3 - 10^2) - ln(10^3) ~= 100 milli-utilons. It seems like billionaires, wh…

I have never seen this log model for the value of model. In the plots I've seen, it always appears that the happiness peaks when you have around twice the money of your peers. Do you have any references?

http://www.nber.org/papers/w14282
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