From: Wei Dai (weidai@weidai.com)
Date: Fri Mar 14 2003 - 04:08:08 MST
On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 10:31:44AM -0800, Hal Finney wrote:
> It would be very interesting to try something on a larger scale, maybe
> using the net. We could think of some public good, like paying some
> person to post more or less, then run the GL mechanism and see what the
> community consensus was. The hard part is probably getting people to
> pay up at the end.
You can solve that problem by having people place a deposit before they
vote (which would be partially refunded depending on their vote), but then
the problem becomes how do you get people to participate to begin with? As
this paper
(http://www.iser.osaka-u.ac.jp/~saijo/pdffiles/20-years-after-main.pdf)
shows, no Pareto-efficient mechanism can guarantee voluntary participation
if the public good is non-excludable. The intution behind the result
should be really obvious. So in general you need a government to coerce
people into participating.
In our case, perhaps we can make the good excludable by using DRM, so that
you have to participate in the GL mechanism in order to be able to read
the posts purchased with the proceeds.
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