Quadratic Funding with Incomplete Information
Luis V. M. Freitas (Global Priorities Institute,
University of Oxford) and Wilfredo L. Maldonado
(University of Sao Paulo)
GPI Working Paper No. 10 - 2022, published in Social Choice and Welfare
Quadratic funding is a public good provision mechanism that satisfies desirable theoretical properties, such as efficiency under complete information, and has been gaining popularity in practical applications. We evaluate this mechanism in a setting of incomplete information regarding individual preferences, and show that this result only holds under knife-edge conditions. We also estimate the inefficiency of the mechanism in a variety of settings and show, in particular, that inefficiency increases in population size and in the variance of expected contribution to the public good. We show how these findings can be used to estimate the mechanism’s inefficiency in a wide range of situations under incomplete information.
Other working papers
Critical-set views, biographical identity, and the long term – Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Critical-set views avoid the Repugnant Conclusion by subtracting some constant from the welfare score of each life in a population. These views are thus sensitive to facts about biographical identity: identity between lives. In this paper, I argue that questions of biographical identity give us reason to reject critical-set views and embrace the total view. I end with a practical implication. If we shift our credences towards the total view, we should also shift our efforts towards ensuring that humanity survives for the long term.
How should risk and ambiguity affect our charitable giving? – Lara Buchak (Princeton University)
Suppose we want to do the most good we can with a particular sum of money, but we cannot be certain of the consequences of different ways of making use of it. This paper explores how our attitudes towards risk and ambiguity bear on what we should do. It shows that risk-avoidance and ambiguity-aversion can each provide good reason to divide our money between various charitable organizations rather than to give it all to the most promising one…
Population ethics with thresholds – Walter Bossert (University of Montreal), Susumu Cato (University of Tokyo) and Kohei Kamaga (Sophia University)
We propose a new class of social quasi-orderings in a variable-population setting. In order to declare one utility distribution at least as good as another, the critical-level utilitarian value of the former must reach or surpass the value of the latter. For each possible absolute value of the difference between the population sizes of two distributions to be compared, we specify a non-negative threshold level and a threshold inequality. This inequality indicates whether the corresponding threshold level must be reached or surpassed in…