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Lessons from a Quadratic Voting Experiment: The Sunlight Music Awards · Yiqin Fu

yiqinfu.github.io · 4,805 words · saved by 1 readers

Quadratic Voting (QV) was popularized by Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl in the 2010s as a mechanism to incorporate intense minority preferences.1 Voters are given “credits” or “tokens” to allocate between candidates. They could cast multiple votes for the same candidate, but the cost in terms of credits is the square of the number of votes one wishes to cast.2 This way, voters get to express not only the direction but also the strength of their preferences, paying a higher marginal cost for each additional vote. While there have been many QV applications (e.g. on a crypto forum, in the Colorado State House, in an online academic study), I wanted to design a QV experiment myself so that 1) voting would produce a substantively meaningful outcome in the real world, 2) the data would be made public for analysis, and 3) I get to “look under the hood” and personally experience any challenges posed by QV, logistical or otherwise. In 2020, with the help of close to 100 strangers on the Intern

Quadratic Voting (QV) was popularized by Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl in the 2010s as a mechanism to incorporate intense minority preferences. 1 Voters are given "credits" or "tokens" to allocate between candidates. They could cast multiple votes for the same candidate, but the cost in terms of credits is the square of the number of votes one wishes to cast. 2 This way, voters get to express not only the direction but also the strength of their preferences, paying a higher marginal cost for each additional vote. While there have been many QV applications (e.g. on a crypto forum , in the Col

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