> [Quote moved to top] > So what is the problem exactly? Asymmetric information. A proposer can create a situation of asymmetric information and exploit it as either a money pump or to rob the public. She can do so easily and to an extreme degree. > The markets estimate NW (national welfare) conditional on policy > choice. When functioning as designed. One can't start with the assumption that this is the case. That would be circular reasoning. So let's keep in mind that we want to discover whether they will function as designed. "Beat hard on new ideas", as a wise man once said > It is presumably hard to increase NW. In equilibrium she submits some > set of proposals which have some average NW and which you claim are > otherwise indistinguishable, and which makes the same public acts > regarding. I'm not sure why you talk about the average NW of her proposals when nobody except herself has any clue what it is. Even she need have no clue. > In that case, the market price would be that average NW for all of > them. Well, why would it be? Nobody but her knows the contents of any of her proposals, so why would they trade them? They'd be buying a pig in a poke. Even after some of her proposals are decrypted, other traders can't form a good estimate, because she need not choose which ones to reveal at random. Obviously we don't share certain assumptions here, and I can't divine yours. I'm wondering why you would say that her proposals' market price would be that figure or any determinate figure at all. Are you thinking that if nobody trades with her, she can't get anything enacted? All she needs is one confederate to insincerely trade. It doesn't even cost her anything besides transaction costs - she's moving money from one pocket to another. Are you thinking that her proposals only become tradeable after she reveals them? If so, then my example misled you and I apologize. If you read it carefully, her proposal, aside from some boilerplate, *is* the cyphertext. She puts that out for trade just like other people do with proposals that say "Build a stadium". If the sticking point is that some rule would prohibit her from submitting encrypted proposals, I'm prepared to argue that there are other effective ways - I merely use crypto as a particularly sharp illustration of opacity. Tom