“Quadratic Voting as a Research Tool” with Glen Weyl, Microsoft Research NYC

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS WORKSHOP

Social scientists often distinguish between “revealed preference” and “stated preference” observations. While the former approach is typically as being viewed as more reliable, use of the later is common in survey research on collective choices such as elections or the design of products where consequential individual decisions are infrequent and coarse. Quadratic Voting (QV) tries to bridge these two approaches by providing an incentive compatible method for eliciting the intensity of preference on collective choices. I will briefly review the theory of QV as a method for collective choice and highlight the sense in which it is uniquely incentive compatible and efficient. I will then discuss how QV has recently been applied in survey research.

E. Glen Weyl is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New England (currently visiting the New York City lab), a visiting Senior Research Scholar at Yale’s economics department and law school and the co-founder with Eric Posner and Kevin Slavin of Collective Decision Engines, a start-up that commercializes Quadratic Voting for survey research applications. His research draws on tools and insights from adjacent fields to economics, such as law, computer science and philosophy, to design practical proposals for radically expanding the scope of efficient markets. He is currently working on a book, Radical Markets, joint with Eric Posner, which argues that markets can address the recent crisis of the liberal order, but only if we can move beyond standard assumptions such as private property, one-person-one-vote and the national control of borders.