Beyond Collusion Resistance: Leveraging Social Information for Plural Funding and Voting
The paper titled "Beyond Collusion Resistance: Leveraging Social Information for Plural Funding and Voting" by Joel Miller, E. Glen Weyl, and Leon Erichsen explores variations of Quadratic Funding (QF) that take into account social connections and incentivize cooperation across social differences. The authors argue that collusion resistant QF and plural QF are interconnected. They define "collusion resistance" as a criterion to prevent the disproportionate accumulation of power in QF models due to pre-existing participant relationships. The authors evaluate different iterations of QF, testing their collusion resistance and addressing other social and technical issues. They propose new mechanisms, including the Connection-Oriented Cluster Match, which satisfies their definition of collusion resistance. The findings of the study suggest the potential to make QF more pluralistic and provide principles for computational design that bridge the gap between classical economics and social reality.
On 2023/1/18, after attending the Plurality Conference, the author mentions the intention to reread the paper. They provide an explanation of QF itself, illustrating how the total funding awarded by QF consists of individual contributions and an extra matching subsidy from an external fund. They include visual representations to demonstrate different scenarios of contributions and the corresponding funding received by projects. The author also introduces the concept of collusion as a threat in QF. On 2023/1/19, the author discusses the distribution methods in QF based on "Social Distance" and mentions various approaches to adjust voting power. They provide a comparison with a quote from the paper and mention that all these methods assume a "Relational Oracle" concept. The author believes that services with legitimacy and a sense of satisfaction, like those mentioned, will continue to be in demand.