@cfrank I agree this is probably unnecesary conflictive, so I will avoid a discussion on that by editing the post.

Still, the two articles are to related for puting them in different threads.

Dear all,

My name is Arturo, I work for the Spanish Central bank, and I present two papers: first an already published journal article where I propose an improvement on Casella Storable Votes, and secondly, a SSRN preprint (not very technical, only eigth pages) where I argue that no matter how good a voting system is, the choice of the voting space is a main ingredient in a governance system.

Storable Votes with a Pay as You Win mechanism
This article (“Storable Votes with a Pay as You Win mechanism” [Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination, pre-print here for access after the expiry of ShareLink, while, please, if there is any problem you can contact me at arturo.macias@gmail.com]) presents a dynamic voting mechanism on multiple alternatives (Storable Votes-Pay as You Win [SV-PAYW]).

At the beginning, all agents are given an equal number of (infinitely divisible) storable votes. The agents say how many votes they are willing “to pay” for each of the possible alternatives and the most voted alternative wins the election. Then, the votes that have been committed to the winning alternative are deducted from each player's account, and are equally redistributed among all participants, and a new voting period begins.

The system reduces the incentives for strategic voting: agents do not stop signaling their interest in alternatives with little probability of victory (if it does not win, you do not pay votes), and it solves the problem of minority disenfranchisement: the more elections a subject loses, the more power future electoral power she accumulates. The article uses exact computational methods (GAMBIT is used for backward induction). The simulations indicate that the PAYW part improves a "fixed number of votes" version of the Storable Votes

SV-PAYW shall be considered as a natural alternative to Quadratic Voting for its use in distributed governance systems (vg. to implement the democratic reforms proposed in Posner and Weyl “Radical Markets”). In my view is equally simple, and the avoidance of strategic behavior is likely to be more complete. Additionally, the sock puppet problem does not exist in SV-PAYW, because the system is linear and “dividing” votes to more electors does not affect electoral power.

The ideal political workflow
In addition to this technical article, I have written this other, much shorter one, about the integration of “preferences” and “knowledge” in governance systems. In my view this paper formalizes the main intuition in Robin Hanson Futarchy system:

The ideal political workflow

This philosophical article was the inspiration to work in voting systems. For me a political system is a mechanism that collects information about preferences and facts and turns them into decisions.

Holistic visions of democracy expect people to make meaningful opinions on public issues and considers that any decision receiving more than half of popular support is legitimate. But the number of decisions is enormous, popular policies are often infeasible and the portfolio of policies that people would take on an issue-by-issue basis would be probably unfeasible (sequential voting is not known to have good properties).

On the other hand, if we were able to provide the voter with the set of possible states of nature, they could simply pick the best “state of the world” and at least in formal terms the exercise would be consistent. The article suggest that an ideal democracy needs a competitive technocracy that helps the voter to bridge the gap between policies and outcomes.