This looks interesting, but I have no idea what I’m looking at with the original paper. Could someone provide a simple summary that doesn’t rely on knowledge of Quadratic Voting?
Here's an explanation of Quadratic Funding from their website[1], which I guess they now refer to as "Plural Funding":
Plural Funding (also known as Quadratic Funding or QF) is a more democratic and scalable form of matching funding for public goods, i.e. any projects valuable to large groups of people and accessible to the general public.
“Matching funding” is a model of funding public goods where a fund from governments or philanthropic institutions matches individual contributions to a project. Plural Funding optimizes matching funds by prioritizing projects based on the number of people who contributed. This way, funds meant to benefit the public go towards projects that really benefit a broad public, instead of things that only have a few wealthy backers. In Plural Funding, [total funding] for a proposal is [the square root of each contribution to it → summed up, then squared.] Plural Funding strongly encourages people to make contributions, no matter how small, and ensures a democratic allocation of funds meant to benefit the public.
EDIT: formatting
Quadratic Funding is a mechanism where individuals voluntarily contribute funds for some public good (e.g. an open source software project), and then these are matched such that the total funding amount is equal to the square of the sum of the square roots of the individual contributions. Under certain assumptions, this formula results in an optimal outcome, where each individual contributes an amount that maximizes their individual utility (given what others are contributing), and total utility for society is also maximized.