On quadratic voting and politics as education

My thoughts on quadratic voting and politics as education - Marginal REVOLUTION: "Voters making a binary decision purchase votes from a clearinghouse paying the square of the number of votes purchased."



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in cosa consiste. Voters making a binary decision purchase votes from a clearinghouse paying the square of the number of votes purchased.... Simple vote trading won’t work, because buying a single vote is too cheap and thus a liquid buyer could accumulate too much political power.  No single vote seller internalizes the threshold effect which arises when a vote buyer approaches the purchase of an operative majority.  Paying the square of the number of votes purchased internalizes this externality by an externally imposed pricing rule, as is demonstrated by the authors.


Consider a firm that wants to learn whether customers care about particular product attributes: colour, quality, price, and so on. Rather than simply ask people what they care about — which leads to notoriously inaccurate results, often where people affect strong views just to maximise their individual influence — a business, or a public service, could supply customers with budgets of credits which they then used to vote, in quadratic fashion, for the attributes they want. This forces the group of respondents, like the swarm of bees, to allocate more resources to the options they care most about.


The authors give gay marriage as an example where a minority group with more intense preferences