This looks interesting, but I have no idea what I’m looking at with the original paper. Could someone provide a simple summary that doesn’t rely on knowledge of Quadratic Voting?
Quadratic Voting and Quadratic Funding have some ideas in common, but they refer to separate concepts. To learn more about these topics, I would probably check out the website for RadicalxChange. IIUC RxC is the main public body attempting to realize the theoretical benefits of QF and related ideas.
Here's an explanation of Quadratic Funding from their website[1], which I guess they now refer to as "Plural Funding":
Plural Funding (also known as Quadratic Funding or QF) is a more democratic and scalable form of matching funding for public goods, i.e. any projects valuable to large groups of people and accessible to the general public.
“Matching funding” is a model of funding public goods where a fund from governments or philanthropic institutions matches individual contributions to a project. Plural Funding optimizes matching funds by prioritizing projects based on the number of people who contributed. This way, funds meant to benefit the public go towards projects that really benefit a broad public, instead of things that only have a few wealthy backers. In Plural Funding, [total funding] for a proposal is [the square root of each contribution to it → summed up, then squared.] Plural Funding strongly encourages people to make contributions, no matter how small, and ensures a democratic allocation of funds meant to benefit the public.
Both QF and QV rely on verifying identity, so that would be counted as one donation of $10,000. The entire point is letting numbers of people balance in some way against amounts of money, so allowing one person to count multiple times breaks the system
I used to think the employer drives to contribute to the company's preferred charity were bad before QF; they’re bound to get a lot worse with it, giving power to employers with lots of employees and a willingness to encourage them to donate as little as a penny.
Here's a very brief summary of what Quadratic Funding is (which is distinct from Quadratic Voting):
Quadratic Funding is a mechanism where individuals voluntarily contribute funds for some public good (e.g. an open source software project), and then these are matched such that the total funding amount is equal to the square of the sum of the square roots of the individual contributions. Under certain assumptions, this formula results in an optimal outcome, where each individual contributes an amount that maximizes their individual utility (given what others are contributing), and total utility for society is also maximized.
