Beyond Collusion Resistance: Leveraging Social Information for Plural Funding and Voting

Abstract

In its 2018 introduction and subsequent work, Quadratic Funding (QF) emerged as a uniquely optimal design for the democratic provision of public goods under the assumption of atomized participants with perfect rationality. In this paper, we aim to move past this rational and atomized portrayal of human beings and explore pluralistic QF mechanisms that recognize the influence of social connections among participants and incentivize cooperation across social differences. With this goal in mind, we define collusion resistance as a criterion against disproportional power accumulation in Quadratic Funding models that can arise from pre-existing participant relationships and argue that collusion resistant QF and plural QF are two sides of the same coin. Next, we evaluate various iterations of Quadratic Funding, testing their collusion resistance and other social and technical issues. Finally, we propose several new mechanisms, including Connection-Oriented Cluster Match, which satisfies our definition of collusion resistance. Our findings show great potential for making Quadratic Funding more pluralistic. They might also guide principles and practices of computational design that bridge the epistemological divides between classical economics and social reality.

Keywords: Quadratic Funding, Mechanism Design, Pluralism, Web3, Public Goods, Collusion

JEL Classification: D82, D63, P48, D61, D71, H41, D85, D70