Quadratic voting

Quadratic voting works by having voters allocate "credits" (which are either real currencies or artificially distributed tokens) to various issues.

[3] The quadratic cost function uniquely enables people to purchase votes in a way that reflects the strength of their preferences proportionally.

If the marginal cost increased less than linearly, someone who values the issue twice as much might buy disproportionately more votes, predisposing the system to favor intense special interests with concentrated preferences.

Although such irrational behavior can cause inefficiency in closer elections, the efficiency gains through preference expression are often sufficient to make QV net beneficial compared to one-person-one-vote systems.

Due to QV allowing people to express preferences continuously, it has been proposed that QV may be more sensitive than 1p1v to social movements that instill misconceptions or otherwise alter voters' behavior away from rationality in a coordinated manner.

[10] One of the earliest known models idealizing quadratic voting was proposed by 3 scientists: William Vickrey, Edward H. Clarke, and Theodore Groves.

The purpose of this mechanism was to find the balance between being a transparent, easy-to-understand function that the market could understand in addition to being able to calculate and charge the specific price of any resource.

This balance could then theoretically act as motivation for users to not only honestly declare their utilities, but also charge them the correct price.

However, much like the majority of the other voting systems proposed during this time, it proved to be too difficult to understand,[12] vulnerable to cheating, weak equilibria, and other impractical deficiencies.

He believed the two main problems of the majority-rule model are that it doesn't always advance the public good and it weakens democracy.

Historically, to discourage political participation of minorities, the majority doesn't hesitate to set legal or physical barriers.

[citation needed] Several alternative proposals have been put forward to counter this concern, with the most popular being QV with an artificial currency.

[18][19][6] Other proposed methods for ameliorating objections to the use of money in real currency QV are: Many areas have been proposed for quadratic voting, including corporate governance in the private sector,[20] allocating budgets, cost-benefit analyses for public goods,[21] more accurate polling and sentiment data,[22] and elections and other democratic decisions.

[23] From this demonstration of quadratic voting, no representative spent all 100 tokens on a single bill, and there was delineation between the discussion topics that were the favorites and also-rans.

[25] The Hackathon projects revolved around 'Cooperative Plurality' – the concept of discovering the richness of diversity that is repressed through human cooperation.

[27] Partner with Deora, Leapdao, a technology start-up company, launched its quadratic voting software consisting of a "burner wallet".

[28] In Brazil, the city council of Gramado has used quadratic voting to define priorities for the year and to reach consensus on tax amendments.

[29] Vitalik Buterin in collaboration with Zoë Hitzig and E. Glen Weyl proposed quadratic funding, a way to allocate the distribution of funds (for example, from a government's budget, a philanthropic source, or collected directly from participants) based on quadratic voting, noting that such a mechanism allows for optimal production of public goods without needing to be determined by a centralized legislature.

Weyl argues that this fills a gap with traditional free markets – which encourage the production of goods and services for the benefit of individuals, but fail to create outcomes desirable to society as a whole – while still benefiting from the flexibility and diversity free markets have compared to many government programs.

[33] Led by Kevin Owocki, Scott Moore, and Vivek Singh, the initiative has distributed more than $60,000,000 to over 3,000 open-source software development projects as of 2022.