Mod of the Week

<aside> 📢 Mod Bio: Joel Miller is a computer science PhD student at the University of Illinois, Chicago. This summer, they’re working with Glen Weyl at Microsoft Research on mechanism design for Quadratic Funding.

</aside>

• Contact info: I’m on twitter (@CS_Synthesist) and you can email me at [email protected].
• Topic + context: Collusion-resistant Quadratic Funding and Pluralist Economics
  • Quadratic Funding (QF) is an appealing mechanism for funding public goods, but it’s vulnerable to attacks from colluding agents. In this talk I’ll review QF and explain the first steps Glen and I have taken towards improving its collusion-resistance. Along the way, I’ll also explain my thoughts on the function of economics research and why I think a pluralist approach to the discipline is best.
• Link to the slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wDZLo84unP0jkghgmo8-hj0FB_QEiGIk/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108756255587055369802&rtpof=true&sd=true

• Question(s) of the week: Theory aside, is Gitcoin’s use of QF vulnerable to collusion in practice? Should soulbound tokens be integrated into Gitcoin, and if so, what do you think the main challenges will be? Lastly, what do you think about economists?
• Format for your session (presentation, activity, discussion, etc): ~40 min presentation with ~20 minutes of questions and discussion after. Questions and comments are also welcomed during the presentation.
• A picture of you to be shared:

• Relevant article/insight to share:

  1. This paper imagines a decentralized society where soulbound tokens, QF, and other structures interact. The appendix contains several ideas for collusion-resistant tweaks to QF, which will be the starting point for the technical part of the talk. Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul by E. Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, Vitalik Buterin :: SSRN
  2. This is a great talk by Yannis Varoufakis, a leftist economist, on some of the problems with conventional microeconomics research. He also argues that economists are not impartial observers but instead actively influence the systems they describe: Yanis Varoufakis: From an Economics without Capitalism to Markets without Capitalism | DiEM25 - YouTube
  3. This webpage has a few different videos on QF: Quadratic Finance | quadratic funding
  4. This paper gives an extensive mathematical treatment of QF. Section 4.1 is probably the most important — it contains a short proof that QF optimally funds goods under the assumption of isolated, selfish agents: Liberal Radicalism: A Flexible Design For Philanthropic Matching Funds by Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig, E. Glen Weyl :: SSRN

• Papers/ media referenced in the slides:

  1. "Too much Maths, too little History: The problem of Economics" - YouTube
  2. Algorithmic Realism: Expanding the Boundaries of Algorithmic Thought (harvard.edu)
  3. Towards a Digital Pluriverse
  4. Why I Am a Pluralist - RadicalxChange

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Meeting Minutes

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