I think your (largely negative) results on QF under incomplete information should be more widely known. I consider myself to be relatively “plugged” into the online communities that have discussed QF the most (RxC, crypto, etc.) and I only learned about your paper a couple of months ago.
Here are a few more scattered thoughts prompted by the post:
I’m really intrigued by the dynamic setting and its potential to alleviate the information problem to some extent. I agree there should be more work on this, theoretical or empirical.
Showing endogenous CQF is (in)efficient under complete information sounds relatively easy, right? I would love it if someone did this or explained why my intuition about hardness is wrong! (Though I expect an eventual efficiency proof wouldn’t go through under incomplete information for the same reasons as in regular QF, so I’m not sure how useful this is in practice.)
Agree with all your points on matching and coordination – the mechanism doesn’t seem to be a good fit there.
In the section on grantmaking, you seem to assume that experts wouldn’t be paying out of their own pockets, but this could be implemented with the following setup: the donor gives them a regranting pot that they can keep for themselves or spend on other projects that will be matched quadratically.
I didn’t know quadratic voting is efficient under incomplete information. Add that to its other advantages (simplicity, budget, etc.) and it comes out as a much stronger option than QF. I have no take on whether it’s better or worse than the other mechanisms you mention, though my sense is that approval voting is the darling of many electoral reform wonks.
Thanks for the comment! On the point of making this information more well-known, is there an easy way to do so, given that I have very little familiarity with these communities?
Showing endogenous CQF is (in)efficient under complete information sounds relatively easy, right? I would love it if someone did this or explained why my intuition about hardness is wrong!
I haven’t tried it, and it could turn out to be quite easy, but I think it’s probably not so trivial to prove the result either way.
Have you considered contacting the authors of the original QF paper? Glenn and Vitalik seem quite approachable. You could also post the paper on the RxC discord or (if you’re willing to go for a high-effort alternative) submit it to their next conference.
Thanks for writing this up!
I think your (largely negative) results on QF under incomplete information should be more widely known. I consider myself to be relatively “plugged” into the online communities that have discussed QF the most (RxC, crypto, etc.) and I only learned about your paper a couple of months ago.
Here are a few more scattered thoughts prompted by the post:
I’m really intrigued by the dynamic setting and its potential to alleviate the information problem to some extent. I agree there should be more work on this, theoretical or empirical.
Showing endogenous CQF is (in)efficient under complete information sounds relatively easy, right? I would love it if someone did this or explained why my intuition about hardness is wrong! (Though I expect an eventual efficiency proof wouldn’t go through under incomplete information for the same reasons as in regular QF, so I’m not sure how useful this is in practice.)
Agree with all your points on matching and coordination – the mechanism doesn’t seem to be a good fit there.
In the section on grantmaking, you seem to assume that experts wouldn’t be paying out of their own pockets, but this could be implemented with the following setup: the donor gives them a regranting pot that they can keep for themselves or spend on other projects that will be matched quadratically.
I didn’t know quadratic voting is efficient under incomplete information. Add that to its other advantages (simplicity, budget, etc.) and it comes out as a much stronger option than QF. I have no take on whether it’s better or worse than the other mechanisms you mention, though my sense is that approval voting is the darling of many electoral reform wonks.
Thanks for the comment! On the point of making this information more well-known, is there an easy way to do so, given that I have very little familiarity with these communities?
I haven’t tried it, and it could turn out to be quite easy, but I think it’s probably not so trivial to prove the result either way.
Have you considered contacting the authors of the original QF paper? Glenn and Vitalik seem quite approachable. You could also post the paper on the RxC discord or (if you’re willing to go for a high-effort alternative) submit it to their next conference.