Quadratic Voting is useful for finding synergies

o1 Pro.icon

(Audrey Tang)

"So in Taiwan since 2018 the Presidential Hackathon every year we have like 200 teams, many many teams. A classic question is how to make sure that we discover which teams have synergy, which teams they work together. ... In Taiwan we use quadratic voting for this. So once you get to the Presidential Hackathon website, you’re asked to log in, and once you log in, you have 99 points, 99 credits.

Nobody spends 99 points on 99 projects so far—I’ve not seen anyone do this. They prefer to go to their favorite project and start voting on it, but they very quickly find they cannot vote 99 votes because 1 vote costs 1 point, 2 votes cost 4 points, 3 votes cost 9 points, and so on—quadratic. ... With 99 points you can’t cast 10 votes (which would require 100), you only have 9 votes (81 points). Once you vote that 9th vote, you still have 18 points left. Nobody wants to waste those 18 points, so people start looking for other projects to see which ones have synergy. ... When people started using quadratic voting, we have much, much better synergy information just based on who voted for which combination of projects—how these would work together.

... And the top 20 (projects) tends to be the ones that work best with many projects, which means they’re more supermodular. So this is how we concretely use quadratic voting to discover that something is more supermodular than the other."

explanation

awareness of the issues

How QV (Quadratic Voting) works

The first vote -> 1 point, the second vote -> another total of 4 points, the third vote -> a total of 9 points, and so on, increasing the "squared" cost.

Even if 99 points are allocated per voter, the voter will quickly run out of points if he or she is "extremely biased toward his or her favorite project," so the voter thinks that it may be more beneficial to spread the vote among other projects as well.

In the process, there is an incentive to look at multiple projects in similar areas and synergies, and naturally try to find the "best combination.

[Relationship to [supermodularity

It is easier to bring to light projects with high super-modularity (high synergy) through voting behavior, i.e., "when combined, they produce more value than the sum of their individual parts."

In other words, QV is a mechanism for participants to spontaneously explore "combinations" and express their intentions in areas where it is difficult to capture "supermodularity" among multiple projects using market principles or ordinary majority voting, and it has been shown to be effective in finding projects with high synergy. It has been shown to be effective in discovering projects with high synergy.

---