I understand that a Schelling Game is a clever way of divining new case-law precedents but I wonder if this method morphs the wisdom of crowds into the madness of crowds by incentivising conformity. It sounds like a ouija session, where the consensus lacks any anchor to expert knowledge which individuals may hold. However, perhaps I’m missing a higher-order effect that mitigates this?
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This is a really important point, the effect is commonly associated with the idea of a Keynesian beauty contest - Wikipedia, where agents are trying to approximate the crowds opinion rather than picking the option that they believe to be inherently best.
The Anchor point in the current version of the protocol is related to the appeal process and the final appeal round lock in.
When an appeal is made, users are essentially betting that the outcome will either be flipped or retained with a larger set of jurors, since anyone can participate in this process (rather than just jurors who have been randomly drafted), people that may have more insight/conviction on a particular case can bet on the outcome to influence the ruling or escalate it.
If the final appeal round is reached every active juror weighs in, and the side that determines the ruling gets locked in. This allows people to exit via the bonding curve (and as a result impacts the exchange rate between ANT and ANJ). This helps to anchor the ruling based on longer term market sentiment related to the court.
In future version we may be able to improve the anchor point further, there is some discussion about the possibility to use Futarchy markets in the final appeal round in this post https://blog.aragon.one/futarchy-courts/ which would help to further anchor the shelling point to not just a majority of jurors, but rather to the long term market sentiment associated with using/adopting the court.
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Anchoring the court’s long-term reputation to a Futarchy market sounds like a good way of accounting for longer-term, higher-order effects and perhaps arriving at an emergent, fuzzy constitution. However, the market would also take into account the demographic likely to use the court, which would tend towards a ‘Republican’ court or ‘Democrat’ court, for example. If the ‘Republican’ market were big enough, the bias would not be corrected by bets on the financial success of the court. As a counterpoint, competing courts may establish ex-nihilo constitutions, which the Futarchy market would also price in…
It’s really, really fascinating…!
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