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As­surance contracts

TagLast edit: 3 Feb 2021 7:52 UTC by Yoav Ravid

An Assurance Contract is a contract of the form “I commit to X if Y other people do the same”. for example, “I commit to come to a protest if 100K other people make the same commitment”. if less than 100K sign this contract, it has no effect. if 100K or more sign it, it goes into effect and everyone who signed it is expected to come to the protest.

Assurance Contracts, at least in theory, are useful coordination tools for problems where collective action is needed and individual actions is for some reason risky or not worth it for the individual if they end up doing it alone or as part of a too small group.

There’s has been much discussion on LessWrong about creating software tools that let people coordinate with assurance contracts. there were already a few similar attempts outside of the community, but it is generally agreed on LW that these tools aren’t good enough yet.

Related pages: Commitment Mechanisms, Pre-Commitment, Coordination /​ Cooperation

Ideas for an ac­tion co­or­di­na­tion website

Yoav Ravid8 Mar 2019 13:32 UTC
20 points
36 comments5 min readLW link

Iter­ated Trust Kickstarters

Raemon20 Apr 2021 3:18 UTC
74 points
18 comments10 min readLW link

Col­lAc­tion his­tory and les­sons learned

Ron17 Jan 2021 15:01 UTC
34 points
6 comments8 min readLW link

[Question] If a “Kick­starter for Inad­e­quate Equlibria” was built, do you have a con­crete in­ad­e­quate equil­ibrium to fix?

Raemon21 Feb 2019 21:32 UTC
55 points
39 comments1 min readLW link

Mak­ing a Crow­dac­tion platform

B Jacobs16 May 2020 16:08 UTC
24 points
9 comments5 min readLW link

[Question] Is there an as­surance-con­tract web­site in work?

Yoav Ravid20 Feb 2019 6:14 UTC
16 points
31 comments1 min readLW link

Thoughts on Crowd­fund­ing with Re­fund Bonuses

Yoav Ravid16 Mar 2022 16:29 UTC
26 points
15 comments6 min readLW link

[Question] Why aren’t as­surance con­tracts widely used?

Daniel Kokotajlo1 Dec 2019 0:20 UTC
32 points
14 comments1 min readLW link

Ex­tract­ing Value from Inad­e­quate Equilibria

eapache18 May 2020 17:25 UTC
49 points
12 comments2 min readLW link

[Question] How could “Kick­starter for Inad­e­quate Equil­ibria” be used for evil or turn out to be net-nega­tive?

Raemon21 Feb 2019 21:36 UTC
25 points
17 comments1 min readLW link
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