glenweyl
Joined 11 years ago
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http://www.glenweyl.com
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Comment · 11 years ago
I couldn't agree more. Lots of social institutions would have to be built up around it to make it work. That is why we are starting on a small scale with market research.
Comment · 11 years ago
That is the point of the software!
Comment · 11 years ago
This is why there is a nominating procedure. I don't think this is a great forum for hashing this all out without a white board, but I would be happy to do it with a whiteboard. I think I could persuade you that there is no case where this can happen in an equilibrium of any model, including with uncertainty about preferences, risk-aversion, etc. to a significant extent and over a reasonable range of cases more than happens in 1p1v. One has to average over a reasonable range of cases to compare different systems. 1p1v can extremely easily lead to a nazi equilibrium as we have seen in practice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
Comment · 11 years 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.
Comment · 11 years ago
Look above; I address this extensively in the paper.
Comment · 11 years ago
Exponential voting would be too close to 1p1v in effect, as we argue in the paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531
Comment · 11 years ago
As Marty Gillens argues in his book Affluence and Influence (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.
Comment · 11 years ago
Comment · 11 years ago
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...
Comment · 11 years ago
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?
Comment · 11 years ago
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.
Comment · 11 years ago
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.
Comment · 11 years ago
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
Comment · 11 years ago
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.
Comment · 11 years ago
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.