Quadratic funding with incomplete information

Quadratic funding is a public good provision mechanism that satisfies desirable theoretical properties, such as efficiency under complete information, and has been gaining popularity in practical applications. We evaluate this mechanism in a setting of incomplete information regarding individual preferences, and show that this result only holds under knife-edge conditions. We also estimate the inefficiency of the mechanism in a variety of settings, and characterize circumstances in which inefficiency increases with population size. We show how these findings can be used to estimate the mechanism’s inefficiency in a wide range of situations under incomplete information.