Quadratic Voting and the Public Good

Quadratic Voting (QV) aims to bring the efficiency of markets to collective decision making by pricing rather than rationing votes. The proposal has attracted substantial interest and controversy in economics, law, philosophy and beyond. The goal of this conference was to evaluate the promise of Quadratic Voting and to stimulate research on QV from a broad range of perspectives. Leading scholars from disciplines ranging from classics to cryptography presented their work on diverse issues related to QV, including the history of the ideas behind it, practical implementation for market research surveys, objections to the use of money in politics and how QV might have averted political disasters in history. The conference papers will be published in a special issue of Public Choice in 2017, following up on a parallel special issue forty years prior on the use of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism for collective decisions.