17 ms·

Quadratic Voting (2014)

210 points by evunveot 11y ago

dnautics 11y ago
If this is really a good thing (tm) then perhaps the best incubator to test the theory in a 'crucible of experiment' would be in corporate governance. As more corporations move towards QV (with, hopefully, good results) it may find its way into political public policy.
- Strilanc 11y ago
  The paper mentions that efficiency of quadratic voting only kicks in with larger numbers of participants (> 50).
- mazsa 11y ago
  FYI: Quadratic Vote Buying as Efficient Corporate Governance http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/643/ http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/643/
- glenweyl 11y ago
  We decided to follow the advice of a leader in the field, Rory Sutherland, and pursue the application to market research surveys first: http://www.research-live.com/impact-magazine/the-shape-of-the-tolerance-zone/4013241.article http://www.research-live.com/impact-magazine/the-shape-of-th.... My start-up, Collective Decision Engines, is actively working on this.
eridius 11y ago
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 seems like this would change tyranny of the majority into tyranny of the wealthy.
- gipp 11y ago
  Right, but the money paid into the system gets redistributed equally. So the poor get paid for their troubles, and under some probably hefty assumptions they show this leading to equilibrium.
- TTPrograms 11y ago
  That's why the cost is the square of the number of votes. Then someone with 100x the wealth would be able to only buy 10x the votes. If you consider the act of lobbying for policy to be equivalent to purchasing votes then currently the cost is linear. Of course by that analogy there's no real way to enforce quadratic cost on lobbyists, but perhaps if there was an alternate "legitimate" means for individuals to purchase voting power then they might follow such a scheme if the alternative were illegal and strictly policed.
- ekurutepe 11y ago
  Theoretically, this could be fixed by making the cost of votes expressed as a percentage of your income and/or wealth. Some european countries like Switzerland are applying this principle to traffic tickets. It's not uncommon for rich people in fast cars paying few hundred thousand dollars for a speeding ticket.
  - torthrw 11y ago
    Really? I'd argue 1% of my income making minimum wage is far less disposable and than a 1% of the one percents salary. And so I would be far less inclined to buy more votes. Then taking your Euro analog, is it right/fair to make someone pay more (even say in proportion to their salary) than any other person for a vote? Who decides how much I should pay for my vote? Is it based on current salary? Because if it is there are a whole load of very rich people who technically have a very small salary. Is it based on net worth? Sounds like a nightmare to me.
    - sukilot 11y ago
      Approximate solutions are better than clearly wrong solutions.
Redoubts 11y ago
I suppose it seems cool, since the fund pays back to the voters -- so it's effectively a tax on political influence against those who would spend a lot on a campaign. But I have to naively ask if this will really change anything. How will this divert money in politics away from directly buying off people in power. It seems like a new, parallel avenue to assault with big bucks.
- gipp 11y ago
  Read to the bottom -- it looks like the general idea here is to empower direct democracy. Less institutional power in the form of representational voting and beauraucratic/constitutional checks on each other means less attack surface for corruption.
  - smsm42 11y ago
    Direct democracy is a very dangerous thing and unchecked can very quickly lead to oppression of minority contingents and minority opinions. And, of course, direct democracy is vulnerable to the base form of corruption in the form of "vote for us and we'll take money from the other guys and give it to you".
    - Veedrac 11y ago
      The whole point of this seems to be to avoid oppression of minority opinions by weighing in how much you care.
ryanthejuggler 11y ago
I feel like this could potentially work with "voting tokens" or something else that's not money. Maybe with some sort of crypto verification. You'd still have the scarcity that the system demands, but without the "inequality baggage" you'd start out with if the system were implemented with actual money. If you implemented this system using money to buy votes, then you'd end up... well probably with something like the inequality situation we have today.
- smsm42 11y ago
  I think one feature of the system is that the accumulated funds are then distributed equally after the vote. With tokens, this would not be very useful, as if everybody gets the same amount tokens, there's no difference between getting one token and getting one million, tokens themselves have no value.
  - pavel_lishin 11y ago
    They have value when it's time to vote for something.
    - smsm42 11y ago
      If voting tokens do not perish between votes, that leads to the similar inequalities if I abstain from voting for a number of cycles. If old tokens do expire, then it doesn't matter when everybody else gets the same - up to the limit of the quantization of tokens, how many tokens you have is less important than how much more tokens than your opponents you have . I.e. if there is a yes/no question, the important thing for you, if you favor "yes", it to have more tokens for "yes" than for "no", but how many tokens for each does not matter. In multilateral choice it's more complex but I think if you have enough tokens to not be limited to voting for one thing because you only have one token, it is again the same situation.
      - ryanthejuggler 11y ago
        > if I abstain from voting for a number of cycles The whole point of the system is to railroad people into only voting for what really matters to them, by "saving up" their votes. I think this isn't a flaw but a feature. I'd expect that there'd be a fairly large number of tokens so that quantization wouldn't come into play too much.
pellmellism 11y ago
blockchain
- toomim 11y ago
  mockchain
  - pellmellism 11y ago
    are we 5?
    - mrpsrinkles 11y ago
      That is: are we 5, sir? for you.
higherpurpose 11y ago
I still prefer approval voting over it: http://www.electology.org/#!approval-voting/cc04 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) very simple (essentially HN style voting) Range voting could also work, but it's debatable whether the extra "scores" are worth the loss of simplicity. Range voting also seems to have a bigger degree of regret, although it does seem to do slightly better with electing the "ideal" candidate.
- ClayShentrup 11y ago
  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 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.
jacques_chester 11y ago
> Majority rule based on one-person-one-vote notoriously results in tyranny of the majority–a large number of people who care only a little about an outcome prevail over a minority that cares passionately, resulting in a reduction of aggregate welfare. Except in voluntary voting systems, where highly motivated voters dominate the apathetic majority.
- smsm42 11y ago
  Mandatory voting won't help as apathetic votes would be either distributed randomly or given according to preference having nothing to do with the issues, such as which candidate is better looking or which one appears more on a popular comedy shows.
  - jacques_chester 11y ago
    You're speaking hypothetically, but the experience of countries with mandatory voting bears out that mandatory voting drives parties towards the median voter, not the fringes. It's called Hotelling's Law. America and Australia have a lot in common, including that of people of eligible to vote, those who have religious aims are in the minority. One of these countries is dominated by the politics of trying to enforce the laws of herders from thousands of years ago. And the other is not. Motivated voters -- such as folk with a religious bee in their bonnet -- are highly over-represented in voluntary systems. In a mandatory system, the median voter dominates. That's generally a better outcome, because the median voter is more interested in Shit Just Sorta Approximately Working, rather than ultra-serious micromotives.
    - smsm42 11y ago
      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. As USA is about 15 times bigger than Australia, fringes are bigger too - on bigger sample, you get more place for exceptional outcomes to manifest. > because the median voter is more interested in Shit Just Sorta Approximately Working, Why this is a good thing? It is known that every hard problem has easy, cheap, understandable and incorrect solution. Or, as you call it, "Shit Just Sorta Approximately Working" but not actually working because of complicated reasons that median voter wouldn't bother to comprehend. So you get a lot of voting for shit that sounds good but doesn't work. How that's good for anything?
Strilanc 11y ago
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, who easily get a factor of a thousand advantage in marginal votes-per-happiness cost over 99% of the population, will massively distort a quadratic voting market. Uniformly redistributing the voting cost makes that effect smaller, but I don't think it overcomes the logarithmic effect.
- SamReidHughes 11y ago
  Billionares are vastly outnumbered by thousandaires. For example, in an FPTP election their ability to buy 31600 votes would, nationally, let them move the 50 yard line, towards which politics converges, 0.001% to the left or right.
  - rosser 11y ago
    > Billionares are vastly outnumbered by thousandaires. While true, the billionaires' liquid and un-accounted-for dollars vastly outnumber the thousandaires'. If Joe Average has to choose between voting on something and paying his mortgage, while Jim Squillionaire is choosing between voting and buying another jet (yes, hyperbole; my point still obtains), guess whose votes you're more likely to see...
    - SamReidHughes 11y ago
      I just explained why spending $1 billion on votes won't affect the outcome of politics, in the other sentence of my post, that you didn't quote. That's part of the reason the cost of votes is nonlinear in this scheme.
      - PepeGomez 11y ago
        You didn't explain anything, you only provided a cryptic analogy.
glenweyl 11y ago
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 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-democracy-wrong-bees-are-doing-it-right/ http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9512322/humans-are-doing...
- tomrod 11y ago
  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.
  - glenweyl 11y ago
    What Lalley and I (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531 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.
- lazzlazzlazz 11y ago
  And in this moment, VoteCoin was born.
  - tgbrter 11y ago
    How do you mine it?
- jmckib 11y ago
  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 address this, or are there other ideas you've heard of that address that problem?
dang 11y ago
What experiments could be (or have been) run to test this?
- glenweyl 11y ago
  Two sets, in very controlled laboratory settings, have turned out well: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aeaweb.org%2Faea%2F2015conference%2Fprogram%2Fretrieve.php%3Fpdfid%3D719&ei=aUhFVYD6BpPggwSdsYCwDA&usg=AFQjCNH2uVQwp8cApJTkWbjKwf99AoQddA&sig2=P6h0unOMsxZ21G4Ov4v51A&bvm=bv.92291466,d.eXY https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c... and http://rangevoting.org/GoereeZhangMar2013.pdf http://rangevoting.org/GoereeZhangMar2013.pdf
fmdud 11y ago
I don't understand, so basically if you're homeless or don't have a bank account, or if you're not in the workforce for one of a million reasons, you don't get a say at all? Am I missing something?
- lifeformed 11y ago
  Votes are cheap when you just want a few of them. Perhaps the first one is free? Then you get a windfall for being a voter, because all the money spent is redistributed per capita among the voters.
fmdud 11y ago
I don't think "the tyranny of the majority" is really the problem.
evanpw 11y ago
It seems important to distinguish between actually voting, where everyone votes or has a chance to vote (at near-zero cost), and lobbying for individual legislation, where only the very highly-motivated "vote", at high cost. In the latter case (lobbying), most people seem to believe that small groups exert too much power over the process. But that's entirely because the majority have essentially zero influence. If some small industry has an intense preference for a special tax break, they would easily be defeated if everyone else expressed their mild disapproval. The problem is not that the rich get too many votes, but that the first vote is too costly. In ordinary voting, the opposite situation is more likely. A small group of people are very passionate about some issue (gay marriage, drug liberalization, environmental protection), while the majority doesn't know or care very much, but is slightly negative on average. In that case, the weak preferences of the majority win out, giving an inefficient outcome. This is where Quadratic Voting could help.
- ericposner 11y ago
  People will be more likely to vote in the first place because they can exert greater influence over the outcomes they care about (say, gay marriage). Once in the voting booth, they can use marginal votes against things they oppose but less passionately (say, farm subsidies). Of course, there are complex design issues--just how much should people vote about, and should a representative system be used instead. But on balance QV should motivate people to vote more not less.
lifeformed 11y ago
If this was implemented, it seems like the best strategy for an interest group would be to spread their funds over as many voters as possible. I wonder what kind of complications that would cause?
- glenweyl 11y ago
  I deal with this in another paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2571012 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2571012
- ericposner 11y ago
  Existing laws that prohibit people from bribing others to vote their way would be sufficient to block this behavior. So would the secret ballot.
jellicle 11y ago
> Majority rule based on one-person-one-vote notoriously results in tyranny of the majority–a large number of people who care only a little about an outcome prevail over a minority that cares passionately, resulting in a reduction of aggregate welfare. Notoriously? In actual practice, U.S. democracy and many others function the exact opposite of what is described (passionate minorities such as Iowa corn farmers and F-35 plane builders and M1A1 tank builders and various intellectual property advocates routinely beat unpassionate majorities, resulting in laws that are bad for most and good for a very few, decreasing overall welfare). The idea that the masses are voting themselves loot from the treasury over the objections of the noble elites is a fantasy that exists only in some libertarian heads, and never in the real world. I can't really read any further in this article. This is basic stuff.
nutate 11y ago
Their startup: http://collectivedecisionengines.com/ http://collectivedecisionengines.com/ seems to give decision makers X units of currency and then refund them the average outlay. It seems like it would have failure modes in communities w/ transient populations. As in, if you give me 100 units, I'll buy 10 votes and know that I at least voted as much as I could. But in conditions where you have a fixed community it could work well. Clearly in the real world if you have 100 credits, a Koch brother would have ~100 million credits... Bill Gates ~200 million credits... (based on US median net worth of $44,000 vs their respective 42billion and ~80billion) But there are plenty of decisions to be made that could be done with fake credits in a controlled environment.
- ericposner 11y ago
  If a Koch brother really wants to use up $40 billion on voting, he could put 200,000 votes on a single issue. If everyone opposes his position, he could be easily outvoted by a small town of low-income people casting a couple votes each for a few dollars. They would also get nearly all his money.
  - nutate 11y ago
    That is quite true, the redistribution on the backend after the vote would be amazing. :D
blula 11y ago
QV would work better than HN's mysterious points system. Give everyone who signs up 100 credits, replenished periodically, to allocate among posts in quadratic fashion.
jmount 11y ago
With all due respect, it sounds like while it might fight flaws common to other voting systems, pay-back based voting will have its own gamesmanship. Consider 1,000 voters upwind of a factory and 1,000 more voters downwind. Suppose the factory wants to stop scrubbing its exhaust for a savings of $1,000 (to itself) and cost of $10 to each down-wind voter (in health costs). All the factory has to do is propose the same initiative (to allow the removal of regulation) again and again and not vote that much. Each time the down-wind people try to protect their selves they transfer money to up-wind abstainers. After enough rounds of this the down-winders are impoverished and the factory buys the election cheaply. Edit: and instead of voting large the factory could try to bribe the up-wind voters or a faction of the down-wind voters.
- glenweyl 11y ago
  This is not an equilibrium; the down-winders would not vote unless they thought that vote mattered. In any case we have a nominating process to avoid this sort of manipulation; see http://ssrn.com/abstract=2321904 http://ssrn.com/abstract=2321904 or http://ssrn.com/abstract=2343956 http://ssrn.com/abstract=2343956.
  - jmount 11y ago
    My point is: it is a bad situation, equilibrium or not. And some down-winders have to vote if the factory votes a little bit each time. Or even if the factory threatens to vote (and then doesn't). If all the magic is in the nominating process- then we really don't need the voting mechanism.
    - glenweyl 11y ago
      Agreed, but what I mean is it can't happen.
    - savanaly 11y ago
      If it's not an equilibrium then it can't happen! That doesn't make the claim foolproof or anything-- maybe it's not actually an equilibrium for one reason or another we didn't foresee, but the phrase "it is a bad situation, equilibrium or not" is nonsensical.
ychantit 11y ago
People in North Africa have been doing this for a while now. When I was kid we had a congressman where I lived in Morocco who win a election with a strategy similar to a quadratic voting. His team went to the poorest neighborhoods of the district and they distribute half (literally half the bill) of today equivalent of 20$ and you get the rest after the election, it had cost him roughly around 100k$ and he won. From the power he got he had made a lot more and been able to invest again in his own district and get two more districts for his son and brother in law in the next election... this is a bad idea at least for the poor. The point is you need an independent third party to establish a fair market value for the votes otherwise the poor will be ripped of...
xnull2guest 11y ago
Quadratic, exponential, or Ackermann - it's a terrible idea to exchange votes for money.
- maaaats 11y ago
  Thanks for a thoughtful and well written comment, it opened my eyes.
  - xnull2guest 11y ago
    Your sarcasm aside, here is a more in depth commentary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8831688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8831688
- Confusion 11y ago
  'Money' does not necessarily mean the same thing you're currently using daily. You could also simply be dealt a finite amount of 'voting tokens' per time unit.
  - xnull2guest 11y ago
    Can you expound on what this would look like? (I don't think that is what the paper is recommending.)
jmckib 11y ago
Tyranny by majority is important, but I wonder if quadratic voting would address another important issue: if enough people are participating, then the cost of voting (research + going to polling station) outweighs the benefit (changing the outcome). The cost of voting is roughly fixed, while the benefit decreases rapidly as the number of participants grows. Maybe if quadratic voting was used, then only people that truly care about an issue would vote, giving the individuals that do care enough influence to make voting worthwhile.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
im3w1l 11y ago
Idea: Sow discord between [group a] and [group b]. Profit as they fight.
glenweyl 11y ago
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.
- nullc 11y ago
  This is assuming that quadratic voting isn't really linear voting. Participants in a process like this aren't "honest" they can't be counted on to follow the rules. In a QV system one can bypass the quadratic penalty by buying people's votes directly for a small premium.
  - glenweyl 11y ago
    Look above; I address this extensively in the paper.
  - ericposner 11y ago
    Think how hard this would be in real life, plus it's illegal to buy votes, and impossible given the secret ballot.
moultano 11y ago
Is there a short sketch of an intuition for why quadratic works better than linear?
bspates 11y ago
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.
- glenweyl 11y ago
  As Marty Gillens argues in his book Affluence and Influence (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9836.html http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9836.html), on almost every issue there is a sub group within those who feel a particular way on an issue that is highly informed about that issue and a subgroup that is less informed. 1p1v gives both groups equal weight while QV gives much more weight to the informed. This is much fairer, because the uniformed group will typically be easily swayed by advertising and manipulation to vote the other way, making groups with more uniformed people easily undermined even if there are some members that are informed and who could speak for this group's interests. This is a major problem in American politics: the poor often favor less redistribution than the rich do (again see Gillens)! So I actually think QV would improve the situation precisely along the dimensions you are highlighting.
  - McDoku 11y ago
    Part of the real issue is identity politics and the black box thinking it generated. Rethorical devices would still maintain the greatest power. You don't need information just conviction and resources.
cge 11y ago
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, 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.
- stormbrew 11y ago
  > 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 of knowing if the person you paid off did it. In this system, the scaling may make it a lot easier to identify that a person followed your directions and spent a particular amount on the vote...
vernon99 11y ago
I 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?
pdonis 11y ago
How does quadratic voting get around Arrow's Theorem?
- beefield 11y ago
  Arrow's Theorem applies only for voting on ordinal scale. QV allows degrees of preferences in voting so Arrow should not apply. (This actually is why I do not understand all the fuss about Arrow)
  - glenweyl 11y ago
    For a long time I thought this too. But then Ken Arrow started working on QV and while he agrees that in spirit QV gets around the theorem, it does not to the letter. The reason is that there can be multiple equilibria given income effects if you had a whole society governed by QV. All equilibria would be pareto-efficient and any pareto-efficient outcome could be implemented by QV, just as in the market economy, but in the market economy as well there may be multiple equilibria with income effects. This has little impact in a small vote in the short-term, but in the long-term taking everything into account, prices changing can impact effective budgets and lead to multiple equilibria. As soon as there are multiple equilibria effectively the system is not transitive because different equilibria are simultaneously preferred and dispreffered by the social ranking to one another. But this does not stop us thinking that the market is a good system because of its efficiency properties. So I think Arrow's theorem has been misunderstood.
BendertheRobot 11y ago
Key phrase is.... Collective good. How do they figure what will accomplish that?
goodmachine 11y ago
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 supporting an opposing vote Pro. Pro voters may react either by believing this signal (and not voting/ buying in at all) or issuing their own claims - all are strongly incentivised to exaggerate their own preferences and strength of support prior to the vote. Bad signalling is bound to occur AFAICT 1. To win the vote cheaply with FUD by scaring off both the apathetic (apathetes, let's call them that) and some percentage of the previously committed. 2. To punish the winning side financially (maximising Winner's Curse) in case of my side losing. This benefits the losers by weakening the winners as a precautionary measure for the next round of voting on some other issue too. That is, I may be likely to oppose the opponents of gay marriage on other issues too, for example. So it's 'worth it' to hurt them. As an aside, QV appears to have a limited concept of time and the irrational (pre-vote FUD, post-vote revenge) alike. There is a distinct taste of 'rational actors' acting rationally (when will they learn?) underpinning the scheme generally. 3. To benefit from maximising pro-rata payout if you are a canny apathete. I must be missing something very obvious here and would be delighted to be corrected. Otherwise QV looks like a fascinating, useful and interesting probe for tabletop scenarios (using virtual currencies for expressing trivial preferences, say).
- glenweyl 11y ago
  As we prove in this paper (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2264245 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.
toolslive 11y ago
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".
- mhuffman 11y ago
  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.
  - glenweyl 11y ago
    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.
fallingfrog 11y ago
This is a terrible, terrible idea. What kind of idiot would pay n^2 dollars for their own votes when they can pay 2n dollars for other people's votes?

210 points by evunveot 11y ago

If this is really a good thing (tm) then perhaps the best incubator to test the theory in a 'crucible of experiment' would be in corporate governance. As more corporations move towards QV (with, hopefully, good results) it may find its way into political public policy.

Strilanc 11y ago
The paper mentions that efficiency of quadratic voting only kicks in with larger numbers of participants (> 50).
mazsa 11y ago
FYI: Quadratic Vote Buying as Efficient Corporate Governance http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/643/ http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/643/
glenweyl 11y ago
We decided to follow the advice of a leader in the field, Rory Sutherland, and pursue the application to market research surveys first: http://www.research-live.com/impact-magazine/the-shape-of-the-tolerance-zone/4013241.article http://www.research-live.com/impact-magazine/the-shape-of-th.... My start-up, Collective Decision Engines, is actively working on this.

eridius 11y ago

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 seems like this would change tyranny of the majority into tyranny of the wealthy.

gipp 11y ago
Right, but the money paid into the system gets redistributed equally. So the poor get paid for their troubles, and under some probably hefty assumptions they show this leading to equilibrium.
TTPrograms 11y ago
That's why the cost is the square of the number of votes. Then someone with 100x the wealth would be able to only buy 10x the votes. If you consider the act of lobbying for policy to be equivalent to purchasing votes then currently the cost is linear. Of course by that analogy there's no real way to enforce quadratic cost on lobbyists, but perhaps if there was an alternate "legitimate" means for individuals to purchase voting power then they might follow such a scheme if the alternative were illegal and strictly policed.
ekurutepe 11y ago
Theoretically, this could be fixed by making the cost of votes expressed as a percentage of your income and/or wealth. Some european countries like Switzerland are applying this principle to traffic tickets. It's not uncommon for rich people in fast cars paying few hundred thousand dollars for a speeding ticket.
- torthrw 11y ago
  Really? I'd argue 1% of my income making minimum wage is far less disposable and than a 1% of the one percents salary. And so I would be far less inclined to buy more votes. Then taking your Euro analog, is it right/fair to make someone pay more (even say in proportion to their salary) than any other person for a vote? Who decides how much I should pay for my vote? Is it based on current salary? Because if it is there are a whole load of very rich people who technically have a very small salary. Is it based on net worth? Sounds like a nightmare to me.
  - sukilot 11y ago
    Approximate solutions are better than clearly wrong solutions.

Redoubts 11y ago

I suppose it seems cool, since the fund pays back to the voters -- so it's effectively a tax on political influence against those who would spend a lot on a campaign. But I have to naively ask if this will really change anything. How will this divert money in politics away from directly buying off people in power. It seems like a new, parallel avenue to assault with big bucks.

gipp 11y ago
Read to the bottom -- it looks like the general idea here is to empower direct democracy. Less institutional power in the form of representational voting and beauraucratic/constitutional checks on each other means less attack surface for corruption.
- smsm42 11y ago
  Direct democracy is a very dangerous thing and unchecked can very quickly lead to oppression of minority contingents and minority opinions. And, of course, direct democracy is vulnerable to the base form of corruption in the form of "vote for us and we'll take money from the other guys and give it to you".
  - Veedrac 11y ago
    The whole point of this seems to be to avoid oppression of minority opinions by weighing in how much you care.

ryanthejuggler 11y ago

I feel like this could potentially work with "voting tokens" or something else that's not money. Maybe with some sort of crypto verification. You'd still have the scarcity that the system demands, but without the "inequality baggage" you'd start out with if the system were implemented with actual money. If you implemented this system using money to buy votes, then you'd end up... well probably with something like the inequality situation we have today.

smsm42 11y ago
I think one feature of the system is that the accumulated funds are then distributed equally after the vote. With tokens, this would not be very useful, as if everybody gets the same amount tokens, there's no difference between getting one token and getting one million, tokens themselves have no value.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  They have value when it's time to vote for something.
  - smsm42 11y ago
    If voting tokens do not perish between votes, that leads to the similar inequalities if I abstain from voting for a number of cycles. If old tokens do expire, then it doesn't matter when everybody else gets the same - up to the limit of the quantization of tokens, how many tokens you have is less important than how much more tokens than your opponents you have . I.e. if there is a yes/no question, the important thing for you, if you favor "yes", it to have more tokens for "yes" than for "no", but how many tokens for each does not matter. In multilateral choice it's more complex but I think if you have enough tokens to not be limited to voting for one thing because you only have one token, it is again the same situation.
    - ryanthejuggler 11y ago
      > if I abstain from voting for a number of cycles The whole point of the system is to railroad people into only voting for what really matters to them, by "saving up" their votes. I think this isn't a flaw but a feature. I'd expect that there'd be a fairly large number of tokens so that quantization wouldn't come into play too much.

pellmellism 11y ago

blockchain

toomim 11y ago
mockchain
- pellmellism 11y ago
  are we 5?
  - mrpsrinkles 11y ago
    That is: are we 5, sir? for you.

higherpurpose 11y ago

I still prefer approval voting over it: http://www.electology.org/#!approval-voting/cc04 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) very simple (essentially HN style voting) Range voting could also work, but it's debatable whether the extra "scores" are worth the loss of simplicity. Range voting also seems to have a bigger degree of regret, although it does seem to do slightly better with electing the "ideal" candidate.

ClayShentrup 11y ago
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 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.

jacques_chester 11y ago

smsm42 11y ago
Mandatory voting won't help as apathetic votes would be either distributed randomly or given according to preference having nothing to do with the issues, such as which candidate is better looking or which one appears more on a popular comedy shows.
- jacques_chester 11y ago
  You're speaking hypothetically, but the experience of countries with mandatory voting bears out that mandatory voting drives parties towards the median voter, not the fringes. It's called Hotelling's Law. America and Australia have a lot in common, including that of people of eligible to vote, those who have religious aims are in the minority. One of these countries is dominated by the politics of trying to enforce the laws of herders from thousands of years ago. And the other is not. Motivated voters -- such as folk with a religious bee in their bonnet -- are highly over-represented in voluntary systems. In a mandatory system, the median voter dominates. That's generally a better outcome, because the median voter is more interested in Shit Just Sorta Approximately Working, rather than ultra-serious micromotives.
  - smsm42 11y ago
    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. As USA is about 15 times bigger than Australia, fringes are bigger too - on bigger sample, you get more place for exceptional outcomes to manifest. > because the median voter is more interested in Shit Just Sorta Approximately Working, Why this is a good thing? It is known that every hard problem has easy, cheap, understandable and incorrect solution. Or, as you call it, "Shit Just Sorta Approximately Working" but not actually working because of complicated reasons that median voter wouldn't bother to comprehend. So you get a lot of voting for shit that sounds good but doesn't work. How that's good for anything?

Strilanc 11y ago

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, who easily get a factor of a thousand advantage in marginal votes-per-happiness cost over 99% of the population, will massively distort a quadratic voting market. Uniformly redistributing the voting cost makes that effect smaller, but I don't think it overcomes the logarithmic effect.

SamReidHughes 11y ago
Billionares are vastly outnumbered by thousandaires. For example, in an FPTP election their ability to buy 31600 votes would, nationally, let them move the 50 yard line, towards which politics converges, 0.001% to the left or right.
- rosser 11y ago
  > Billionares are vastly outnumbered by thousandaires. While true, the billionaires' liquid and un-accounted-for dollars vastly outnumber the thousandaires'. If Joe Average has to choose between voting on something and paying his mortgage, while Jim Squillionaire is choosing between voting and buying another jet (yes, hyperbole; my point still obtains), guess whose votes you're more likely to see...
  - SamReidHughes 11y ago
    I just explained why spending $1 billion on votes won't affect the outcome of politics, in the other sentence of my post, that you didn't quote. That's part of the reason the cost of votes is nonlinear in this scheme.
    - PepeGomez 11y ago
      You didn't explain anything, you only provided a cryptic analogy.

glenweyl 11y ago

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 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-democracy-wrong-bees-are-doing-it-right/ http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9512322/humans-are-doing...

tomrod 11y ago
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.
- glenweyl 11y ago
  What Lalley and I (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531 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.
lazzlazzlazz 11y ago
And in this moment, VoteCoin was born.
- tgbrter 11y ago
  How do you mine it?
jmckib 11y ago
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 address this, or are there other ideas you've heard of that address that problem?

dang 11y ago

What experiments could be (or have been) run to test this?

glenweyl 11y ago
Two sets, in very controlled laboratory settings, have turned out well: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aeaweb.org%2Faea%2F2015conference%2Fprogram%2Fretrieve.php%3Fpdfid%3D719&ei=aUhFVYD6BpPggwSdsYCwDA&usg=AFQjCNH2uVQwp8cApJTkWbjKwf99AoQddA&sig2=P6h0unOMsxZ21G4Ov4v51A&bvm=bv.92291466,d.eXY https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c... and http://rangevoting.org/GoereeZhangMar2013.pdf http://rangevoting.org/GoereeZhangMar2013.pdf

fmdud 11y ago

I don't understand, so basically if you're homeless or don't have a bank account, or if you're not in the workforce for one of a million reasons, you don't get a say at all? Am I missing something?

lifeformed 11y ago
Votes are cheap when you just want a few of them. Perhaps the first one is free? Then you get a windfall for being a voter, because all the money spent is redistributed per capita among the voters.

fmdud 11y ago

I don't think "the tyranny of the majority" is really the problem.

evanpw 11y ago

It seems important to distinguish between actually voting, where everyone votes or has a chance to vote (at near-zero cost), and lobbying for individual legislation, where only the very highly-motivated "vote", at high cost. In the latter case (lobbying), most people seem to believe that small groups exert too much power over the process. But that's entirely because the majority have essentially zero influence. If some small industry has an intense preference for a special tax break, they would easily be defeated if everyone else expressed their mild disapproval. The problem is not that the rich get too many votes, but that the first vote is too costly. In ordinary voting, the opposite situation is more likely. A small group of people are very passionate about some issue (gay marriage, drug liberalization, environmental protection), while the majority doesn't know or care very much, but is slightly negative on average. In that case, the weak preferences of the majority win out, giving an inefficient outcome. This is where Quadratic Voting could help.

ericposner 11y ago
People will be more likely to vote in the first place because they can exert greater influence over the outcomes they care about (say, gay marriage). Once in the voting booth, they can use marginal votes against things they oppose but less passionately (say, farm subsidies). Of course, there are complex design issues--just how much should people vote about, and should a representative system be used instead. But on balance QV should motivate people to vote more not less.

lifeformed 11y ago

If this was implemented, it seems like the best strategy for an interest group would be to spread their funds over as many voters as possible. I wonder what kind of complications that would cause?

glenweyl 11y ago
I deal with this in another paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2571012 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2571012
ericposner 11y ago
Existing laws that prohibit people from bribing others to vote their way would be sufficient to block this behavior. So would the secret ballot.

jellicle 11y ago

> Majority rule based on one-person-one-vote notoriously results in tyranny of the majority–a large number of people who care only a little about an outcome prevail over a minority that cares passionately, resulting in a reduction of aggregate welfare. Notoriously? In actual practice, U.S. democracy and many others function the exact opposite of what is described (passionate minorities such as Iowa corn farmers and F-35 plane builders and M1A1 tank builders and various intellectual property advocates routinely beat unpassionate majorities, resulting in laws that are bad for most and good for a very few, decreasing overall welfare). The idea that the masses are voting themselves loot from the treasury over the objections of the noble elites is a fantasy that exists only in some libertarian heads, and never in the real world. I can't really read any further in this article. This is basic stuff.

nutate 11y ago

Their startup: http://collectivedecisionengines.com/ http://collectivedecisionengines.com/ seems to give decision makers X units of currency and then refund them the average outlay. It seems like it would have failure modes in communities w/ transient populations. As in, if you give me 100 units, I'll buy 10 votes and know that I at least voted as much as I could. But in conditions where you have a fixed community it could work well. Clearly in the real world if you have 100 credits, a Koch brother would have ~100 million credits... Bill Gates ~200 million credits... (based on US median net worth of $44,000 vs their respective 42billion and ~80billion) But there are plenty of decisions to be made that could be done with fake credits in a controlled environment.

ericposner 11y ago
If a Koch brother really wants to use up $40 billion on voting, he could put 200,000 votes on a single issue. If everyone opposes his position, he could be easily outvoted by a small town of low-income people casting a couple votes each for a few dollars. They would also get nearly all his money.
- nutate 11y ago
  That is quite true, the redistribution on the backend after the vote would be amazing. :D

blula 11y ago

QV would work better than HN's mysterious points system. Give everyone who signs up 100 credits, replenished periodically, to allocate among posts in quadratic fashion.

jmount 11y ago

With all due respect, it sounds like while it might fight flaws common to other voting systems, pay-back based voting will have its own gamesmanship. Consider 1,000 voters upwind of a factory and 1,000 more voters downwind. Suppose the factory wants to stop scrubbing its exhaust for a savings of $1,000 (to itself) and cost of $10 to each down-wind voter (in health costs). All the factory has to do is propose the same initiative (to allow the removal of regulation) again and again and not vote that much. Each time the down-wind people try to protect their selves they transfer money to up-wind abstainers. After enough rounds of this the down-winders are impoverished and the factory buys the election cheaply. Edit: and instead of voting large the factory could try to bribe the up-wind voters or a faction of the down-wind voters.

glenweyl 11y ago
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 http://ssrn.com/abstract=2321904 or http://ssrn.com/abstract=2343956 http://ssrn.com/abstract=2343956.
- jmount 11y ago
  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.
  - glenweyl 11y ago
    Agreed, but what I mean is it can't happen.
  - savanaly 11y ago
    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.

ychantit 11y ago

People in North Africa have been doing this for a while now. When I was kid we had a congressman where I lived in Morocco who win a election with a strategy similar to a quadratic voting. His team went to the poorest neighborhoods of the district and they distribute half (literally half the bill) of today equivalent of 20$ and you get the rest after the election, it had cost him roughly around 100k$ and he won. From the power he got he had made a lot more and been able to invest again in his own district and get two more districts for his son and brother in law in the next election... this is a bad idea at least for the poor. The point is you need an independent third party to establish a fair market value for the votes otherwise the poor will be ripped of...

xnull2guest 11y ago

Quadratic, exponential, or Ackermann - it's a terrible idea to exchange votes for money.

maaaats 11y ago
Thanks for a thoughtful and well written comment, it opened my eyes.
- xnull2guest 11y ago
  Your sarcasm aside, here is a more in depth commentary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8831688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8831688
Confusion 11y ago
'Money' does not necessarily mean the same thing you're currently using daily. You could also simply be dealt a finite amount of 'voting tokens' per time unit.
- xnull2guest 11y ago
  Can you expound on what this would look like? (I don't think that is what the paper is recommending.)

jmckib 11y ago

Tyranny by majority is important, but I wonder if quadratic voting would address another important issue: if enough people are participating, then the cost of voting (research + going to polling station) outweighs the benefit (changing the outcome). The cost of voting is roughly fixed, while the benefit decreases rapidly as the number of participants grows. Maybe if quadratic voting was used, then only people that truly care about an issue would vote, giving the individuals that do care enough influence to make voting worthwhile.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

im3w1l 11y ago

Idea: Sow discord between [group a] and [group b]. Profit as they fight.

glenweyl 11y ago

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.

nullc 11y ago
This is assuming that quadratic voting isn't really linear voting. Participants in a process like this aren't "honest" they can't be counted on to follow the rules. In a QV system one can bypass the quadratic penalty by buying people's votes directly for a small premium.
- glenweyl 11y ago
  Look above; I address this extensively in the paper.
- ericposner 11y ago
  Think how hard this would be in real life, plus it's illegal to buy votes, and impossible given the secret ballot.

moultano 11y ago

Is there a short sketch of an intuition for why quadratic works better than linear?

bspates 11y ago

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.

glenweyl 11y ago
As Marty Gillens argues in his book Affluence and Influence (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9836.html http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9836.html), on almost every issue there is a sub group within those who feel a particular way on an issue that is highly informed about that issue and a subgroup that is less informed. 1p1v gives both groups equal weight while QV gives much more weight to the informed. This is much fairer, because the uniformed group will typically be easily swayed by advertising and manipulation to vote the other way, making groups with more uniformed people easily undermined even if there are some members that are informed and who could speak for this group's interests. This is a major problem in American politics: the poor often favor less redistribution than the rich do (again see Gillens)! So I actually think QV would improve the situation precisely along the dimensions you are highlighting.
- McDoku 11y ago
  Part of the real issue is identity politics and the black box thinking it generated. Rethorical devices would still maintain the greatest power. You don't need information just conviction and resources.

cge 11y ago

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, 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.

stormbrew 11y ago
> 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 of knowing if the person you paid off did it. In this system, the scaling may make it a lot easier to identify that a person followed your directions and spent a particular amount on the vote...

vernon99 11y ago

I 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?

pdonis 11y ago

How does quadratic voting get around Arrow's Theorem?

beefield 11y ago
Arrow's Theorem applies only for voting on ordinal scale. QV allows degrees of preferences in voting so Arrow should not apply. (This actually is why I do not understand all the fuss about Arrow)
- glenweyl 11y ago
  For a long time I thought this too. But then Ken Arrow started working on QV and while he agrees that in spirit QV gets around the theorem, it does not to the letter. The reason is that there can be multiple equilibria given income effects if you had a whole society governed by QV. All equilibria would be pareto-efficient and any pareto-efficient outcome could be implemented by QV, just as in the market economy, but in the market economy as well there may be multiple equilibria with income effects. This has little impact in a small vote in the short-term, but in the long-term taking everything into account, prices changing can impact effective budgets and lead to multiple equilibria. As soon as there are multiple equilibria effectively the system is not transitive because different equilibria are simultaneously preferred and dispreffered by the social ranking to one another. But this does not stop us thinking that the market is a good system because of its efficiency properties. So I think Arrow's theorem has been misunderstood.

BendertheRobot 11y ago

Key phrase is.... Collective good. How do they figure what will accomplish that?

goodmachine 11y ago

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 supporting an opposing vote Pro. Pro voters may react either by believing this signal (and not voting/ buying in at all) or issuing their own claims - all are strongly incentivised to exaggerate their own preferences and strength of support prior to the vote. Bad signalling is bound to occur AFAICT 1. To win the vote cheaply with FUD by scaring off both the apathetic (apathetes, let's call them that) and some percentage of the previously committed. 2. To punish the winning side financially (maximising Winner's Curse) in case of my side losing. This benefits the losers by weakening the winners as a precautionary measure for the next round of voting on some other issue too. That is, I may be likely to oppose the opponents of gay marriage on other issues too, for example. So it's 'worth it' to hurt them. As an aside, QV appears to have a limited concept of time and the irrational (pre-vote FUD, post-vote revenge) alike. There is a distinct taste of 'rational actors' acting rationally (when will they learn?) underpinning the scheme generally. 3. To benefit from maximising pro-rata payout if you are a canny apathete. I must be missing something very obvious here and would be delighted to be corrected. Otherwise QV looks like a fascinating, useful and interesting probe for tabletop scenarios (using virtual currencies for expressing trivial preferences, say).

glenweyl 11y ago
As we prove in this paper (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2264245 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.

toolslive 11y ago

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".

mhuffman 11y ago
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.
- glenweyl 11y ago
  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.

fallingfrog 11y ago

This is a terrible, terrible idea. What kind of idiot would pay n^2 dollars for their own votes when they can pay 2n dollars for other people's votes?