Who is Zoë Hitzig?

How should money be given to things everyone can use, such as open software? This is one of the authors of the paper that answered with a mechanism based on square roots.

In short

Zoë Hitzig is one of the three people who first wrote up Quadratic Funding (QF) in a paper [1].

QF is a mechanism for adding matching money to donations to things people want to support together (public goods). The more people donate to something, even small amounts, the larger the matching it receives [1]. Hitzig took part in editing the book Plurality, and the book also cites Hitzig's paper criticizing the design of market mechanisms [2][3].

Connection to Plurality

One of the book's writers. The book records its contributors in the "⿻ credits". Hitzig is listed under "Editing", with a holding of 12.00 as of early April 2024 [2].

Co-author of the first QF paper. The paper is "A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods" by Vitalik Buterin, Hitzig and Glen Weyl (E. Glen Weyl). It appeared on arXiv, a site for publishing papers, in 2018, and was published in the journal Management Science in 2019. In the arXiv version, Hitzig's affiliation is Harvard University [1][4]. Chapter 5-7 of the book, "Social Markets", cites this paper [4].

Counted among the authors as a critic. Chapter 4-4 of the book writes that market institutions, such as the allocation of radio spectrum, have been designed out of public view by teams of technocratic engineers and economists. In a footnote it then says that the authors of the book have been prominent critics of such designs. The examples it gives are Hitzig's paper "The Normative Gap: Mechanism Design and Ideal Theories of Justice" (in the journal Economics and Philosophy) and pieces by Weyl [3].

Other citations. Chapter 4-2 cites the paper "Contextual Confidence and Generative AI" (2023) by Shrey Jain, Hitzig and Pamela Mishkin [5]. Chapters 5-7 and 7-0 cite "Economic Democracy and Market Power" (2020) by Hitzig, Michelle Meagher, André Veiga and Weyl [4][6].

Main ideas

Quadratic Funding. The paper proposed a mechanism in which the amount a project receives is the square of the sum of the square roots of each donation it receives [1].

For example (with made-up numbers), a project to which one person donates $100 receives √100 = 10, squared, which is $100. A project to which 100 people donate $1 each receives √1 = 1 added up for 100 people, which is 100, squared, which is $10,000. Both received $100 in donations in total, but the latter, supported by many people, gets much more matching. The difference comes from a fund prepared in advance.

The paper argues that under standard assumptions this mechanism supplies public goods in the optimal amount [1]. → Quadratic Funding

A normative question for mechanism design. "The Normative Gap" is cited in the book as an example of criticism of market institutions designed by technocrats [3].

Context and personhood in the age of generative AI. "Contextual Confidence" is cited in chapter 4-2 in the discussion of the contexts in which information is shared [5]. → Contextual integrity, ⿻ Publics. The reading list of the 6-Pack of Care by Audrey Tang and others also includes "Personhood Credentials" (2024), co-written by Hitzig, a paper on privacy-preserving tools for telling real humans apart online [7]. → Proof of personhood

Further reading

1. Buterin, Hitzig and Weyl, "A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods" (English, paper, 2018) — https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06421
2. Plurality, 4-4 "Property and Contract" (English, book) — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-4/eng/
3. Jain, Hitzig and Mishkin, "Contextual Confidence and Generative AI" (English, paper, 2023) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01193
4. Adler, Hitzig, Jain et al., "Personhood Credentials" (English, paper, 2024) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.07892
5. Chinese Wikipedia, "平方投票法" (Quadratic voting) (in Traditional Chinese, encyclopedia, CC BY-SA 4.0) — https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%B9%B3%E6%96%B9%E6%8A%95%E7%A5%A8%E6%B3%95

Sources

1. Buterin, Hitzig and Weyl, "A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods" (arXiv, 2018-09-17) — https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06421
2. Plurality, ⿻ credits — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/0-3/eng/ ［CC0］
3. Plurality, 4-4 "Property and Contract" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-4/eng/ ［CC0］
4. Plurality, 5-7 "Social Markets" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-7/eng/ ［CC0］
5. Plurality, 4-2 "Association and ⿻ Publics" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-2/eng/ ［CC0］
6. Plurality, 7-0 "Policy" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/7-0/eng/ ［CC0］
7. 6-Pack of Care, "Sources & Further Reading" — https://civic.ai/sources/ ［CC0］