One route towards analysing this would be to identify a unit of currency which was held in roughly equal value by all delegates (at least at the margin), so that we can analyse how much they value other things in terms of this unit of currency—this could lead to market prices for things (?).
Perhaps a natural choice for a currency unit would be something like ‘unit of total say in the parliament’. So for example a 1% chance that things go the way of your theory, applied before whatever else would happen.
I’m not sure if this could even work, just throwing it out there.
The idea of explicit vote-selling is probably the easiest way to have ‘enforceable contracts’ without things getting particularly sticky. (If you have ordered votes and no enforceable contracts, then vote order becomes super important and trading basically breaks apart. But if you have ordered votes and vote sales, then trading is still possible because the votes can’t switch.)
But I don’t think the prices are going to be that interesting- if the vote’s on the edge, then all votes are valuable, but as soon as one vote changes hand the immediate price of all votes drops back to 0. Calculating the value of, say, amassing enough votes to deter any trading on that vote seems like it might add a lot of murkiness without much increased efficiency.
The voting system is set up to avoid these edge effects. From the opening post:
(Actually, we use an extra trick here: we imagine that the delegates act as if the Parliament’s decision were a stochastic variable such that the probability of the Parliament taking action A is proportional to the fraction of votes for A. This has the effect of eliminating the artificial 50% threshold that otherwise gives a majority bloc absolute power. Yet – unbeknownst to the delegates – the Parliament always takes whatever action got the most votes: this way we avoid paying the cost of the randomization!)
Hm, somehow I failed to notice that. It’s not clear to me that you want to avoid the edge effects, though; delegates might trade away influence on contentious issues (where we have significant moral uncertainty) to double down on settled issues (where we have insignificant moral uncertainty), if the settled issues are sufficiently important. Eliezer’s concern that delegates could threaten to vote ‘no’ on something important would make others desperately buy their votes away from them- unless you have a nonlinearity which makes the delegates secure that a lone filibuster won’t cause trouble.
[edit]On second thought, though, it seems likely to be desirable that delegates / the parliament would behave linearly in the probability of various moral theories. The concern is mostly that this means we’ll end up doing averaging, and nothing much more interesting.
One route towards analysing this would be to identify a unit of currency which was held in roughly equal value by all delegates (at least at the margin), so that we can analyse how much they value other things in terms of this unit of currency—this could lead to market prices for things (?).
Perhaps a natural choice for a currency unit would be something like ‘unit of total say in the parliament’. So for example a 1% chance that things go the way of your theory, applied before whatever else would happen.
I’m not sure if this could even work, just throwing it out there.
The idea of explicit vote-selling is probably the easiest way to have ‘enforceable contracts’ without things getting particularly sticky. (If you have ordered votes and no enforceable contracts, then vote order becomes super important and trading basically breaks apart. But if you have ordered votes and vote sales, then trading is still possible because the votes can’t switch.)
But I don’t think the prices are going to be that interesting- if the vote’s on the edge, then all votes are valuable, but as soon as one vote changes hand the immediate price of all votes drops back to 0. Calculating the value of, say, amassing enough votes to deter any trading on that vote seems like it might add a lot of murkiness without much increased efficiency.
The voting system is set up to avoid these edge effects. From the opening post:
Hm, somehow I failed to notice that. It’s not clear to me that you want to avoid the edge effects, though; delegates might trade away influence on contentious issues (where we have significant moral uncertainty) to double down on settled issues (where we have insignificant moral uncertainty), if the settled issues are sufficiently important. Eliezer’s concern that delegates could threaten to vote ‘no’ on something important would make others desperately buy their votes away from them- unless you have a nonlinearity which makes the delegates secure that a lone filibuster won’t cause trouble.
[edit]On second thought, though, it seems likely to be desirable that delegates / the parliament would behave linearly in the probability of various moral theories. The concern is mostly that this means we’ll end up doing averaging, and nothing much more interesting.