Democratic institutions aggregate preferences poorly. The norm of one-person-one-vote with majority rule treats people fairly by giving everyone an equal chance to influence outcomes, but fails to give proportional weight to people whose interests in a social outcome are stronger than those of...

We study the performance of the Quadratic Voting (QV) mechanism proposed by Lalley and Weyl (2016) in finite populations of various sizes using three decreasingly analytic but increasingly precise methods with emphasis on examples calibrated to the 2008 gay marriage referendum in California....

We study a voting scheme for multiple alternatives. Our scheme generalizes the two-alternative quadratic voting scheme of Lalley and Weyl. We prove that our generalization results in an outcome where the most-valued alternative wins, and that the vote totals order alternatives from most-to-least...

Can mechanism design save democracy? We propose a simple design that offers a chance: individuals pay for as many votes as they wish using a number of "voice credits" quadratic in the votes they buy. Only quadratic cost induces marginal costs linear in votes purchased and thus welfare optimality...

A group of N individuals must choose between two collective alternatives. Under Quadratic Voting (QV), agents buy votes in favor of their preferred alternative from a clearing house, paying the square of the number of votes purchased; the sum of all votes purchased determines the outcome. We...

Lalley and Weyl (2016) propose a mechanism for binary collective decisions, Quadratic Voting, and prove its approximate efficiency in large populations in a stylized environment. They motivate their proposal substantially based on its greater robustness when compared with pre-existing efficient...