A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods

Vitalik Buterin, Zoe Hitzig and E. Glen Weyl

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We propose a design for philanthropic or publicly-funded seeding to allow (near) optimal provision of a decentralized, self-organizing ecosystem of public goods. The concept extends ideas from Quadratic Voting to a funding mechanism for endogenous community formation. Individuals make public goods contributions to projects of value to them. The amount received by the project is (proportional to) the square of the sum of the square roots of contributions received. Under the "standard model" this yields first best public goods provision. Variations can limit the cost, help protect against collusion and aid coordination. We discuss applications to campaign finance, open source software ecosystems, news media finance and urban public projects. More broadly, we offer a resolution to the classic liberal-communitarian debate in political philosophy by providing neutral and non-authoritarian rules that nonetheless support collective organization.

Date: 2018-09, Revised 2020-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-des, nep-pol and nep-ppm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in 2019 Management Science 65(11): 5171-5187

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.06421 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:1809.06421

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().