"Quadratically Normalized Utilitarian Voting"
Co-authored with Marcus Pivato

Abstract : What if a voter could declare how much they value alternatives rather than simply reporting their first preference or ranking the alternatives ? We propose a new voting mechanism in which voters simultaneously report their von Neumann-Morgenstern (vNM) utility functions across multiple decision problems, each of which has a finite number of alternatives. Each voter must report a real-valued "valuation" for each alternative of each decision. Each voter’s valuation vector is rescaled to have a unit magnitude (where this magnitude is measured using a specially constructed quadratic form). We show that it is a dominant strategy for each voter to reveal her true vNM utility function. With a very high probability, the mechanism selects the alternative that maximizes a weighted utilitarian social welfare function. Therefore, the mechanism thus achieves efficient outcomes while allowing voters to express the intensity of their preferences. The mechanism does not use money, and does not assume quasilinear utilities.