When administrative agencies regulate, they are legally required to quantify the costs and benefits of their regulations. Yet most agencies struggle at this task. This is in part because a large number of regulations provide benefits that are not traded in markets and cannot be easily priced. These types of benefits are difficult to assess in monetary terms, even though they are almost surely sizeable. Agencies typically try to price non-market benefits using contingent valuation studies, which are surveys that ask people how much they would be willing to pay without any real money actually changing hands. Unsurprisingly, contingent valuation surveys have proven to be inaccurate and unreliable. Instead, agencies should use quadratic voting (QV) to price nonmarket goods. Quadratic voting is a decision procedure in which voters use actual dollars to buy votes for or against a ballot proposition or candidate. Both the marginal cost of buying an additional vote and the marginal benefit of doing so -- the probability of casting the pivotal vote -- increase linearly with the number of votes cast. When marginal costs and marginal benefits are equal, individuals are likely to buy votes in proportion to their actual preferences. This leads to socially efficient outcomes. Quadratic voting is particularly suited to administrative regulation because agencies already have the legal authority to use quadratic votes as inputs to the regulatory process. Given the advantages of quadratic voting, and the fact that agencies could adopt QV without waiting for Congress, there is little reason for them not to act.

Lalley and Weyl (2016) propose a mechanism for binary collective decisions, Quadratic Voting, and prove its approximate efficiency in large populations in a stylized environment. They motivate their proposal substantially based on its greater robustness when compared with pre-existing efficient collective decision mechanisms. However these suggestions are based purely on discussion of structural properties of the mechanism. In this paper I study these robustness properties quantitatively in an equilibrium model. Given the mathematical challenges with establishing results on QV fully formally, my analysis relies on a number of structural conjectures that have been proven in analogous settings in the literature, but in the models I consider here. While most of the factors I study reduce the efficiency of QV to some extent, it is reasonably robust to all of them and quite robustly outperforms one-person-one-vote. Collusion and fraud, except on a very large scale, are deterred either by unilateral deviation incentives or by the reactions of non-participants to the possibility of their occurring. I am only able to study aggregate uncertainty for particular parametric distributions, but using the most canonical structures in the literature I find that such uncertainty reduces limiting efficiency, but never by a large magnitude. Voter mistakes or non-instrumental motivations for voting, so long as they are uncorrelated with values, may either improve or harm efficiency depending on the setting. These findings contrasts with existing (approximately) efficient mechanisms, all of which are highly sensitive to at least one of these factors.

Can mechanism design save democracy? We propose a simple design that offers a chance: individuals pay for as many votes as they wish using a number of "voice credits" quadratic in the votes they buy. Only quadratic cost induces marginal costs linear in votes purchased and thus welfare optimality if individuals' valuation of votes is proportional to their value of changing the outcome. A variety of analysis and evidence suggests that this still-nascent mechanism has significant promise to robustly correct the failure of existing democracies to incorporate intensity of preference and knowledge.The online appendix for "Quadratic Voting: How Mechanism Design Can Radicalize Democracy" may be found here: 'http://ssrn.com/abstract=2790624' http://ssrn.com/abstract=2790624.

Choice is the name of the game. Government sets the size of the public budget and decides which public projects it will invest in and which transfers and regulations it will implement. To do this systematically the government must have a procedure that displays the consequences of the alternatives. This book is an exposition of benefit-cost analysis (BCA), an analytic framework for organizing thoughts, listing the pros and cons of alternatives, and determining values for all relevant factors so that the alternatives can be ranked. A major question illuminated by this text is whether the results of such an analysis can instruct government--in the sense of telling it what it must do to avoid being labelled stupid, corrupt, irrational, and/or inefficient. How and when, we will ask, can the benefit-cost analyst label a particular governmental investment, policy, or regulation as political (in the pejorative sense) as opposed to economic (in the laudatory sense of being economically justified)? This book will argue that BCA is much like a consumer information system. Consumer information neither tells consumers what to do nor tells them what they should want. However, it does tell them which products will perform in selected ways and at what costs. And this information, together with the independently arrived at wants, helps the consumer make intelligent choices.

We trace the developments that led to quadratic voting, from Vickrey's counterspeculation mechanism and his second-price auction through the family of Groves mechanisms and its most notable member, the Clarke mechanism, to the expected externality mechanism, the Groves-Ledyard mechanism, and the Hylland-Zeckhauser mechanism. We show that these mechanisms are all applications of the fundamental insight that for a process to be efficient, all partiesinvolved must bear the marginal costs of their actions.

Quadratic Voting (QV) is a promising technique for improving group decisionmaking by accounting for preference intensities. QV is a social choice mechanism in which voters buy votes for or against a proposal at a quadratic cost and the outcome with the most votes wins. In some cases, individuals are asymmetrically informed about the effects of legislation and therefore their valuations of legislation. For instance, anti-corruption legislation is the most beneficial to taxpayers and the most detrimental to corrupt officials when corruption opportunities are plentiful, but government officials have better information than taxpayers about how many corruption opportunities exist. I provide an example of a setting in a large population where QV does not achieve approximate efficiency despite majority voting achieving full efficiency. In this example, a society considers an anti-corruption policy that protects taxpayers from corruption by deterring corruption. Officials know whether corruption opportunities exist, but taxpayers are uncertain about whether corruption opportunities exist. I present surprising experimental results showing that in one case where theory predicts QV will perform poorly and majority voting will perform relatively well, QV performs much better than expected and is about as efficient as majority voting.

Storable Votes and Quadratic Voting are voting systems designed to account for voters' intensity of preferences. We test their performance in two samples of California residents using data on four initiatives prepared for the 2016 California ballot. We bootstrap the original samples and generate two sets of 10,000 multi-elections simulations. As per design, both systems induce minority victories and result in higher expected welfare relative to majority voting. In our parametrization, quadratic voting induces more minority victories and achieves higher average welfare, but causes more frequent inefficient minority victories. The results are robust to different plausible rules-of-thumb in casting votes.