I draw on contemporary debates in political philosophy to understand the limits and hazards of using mechanism design to offer technical solutions to problems in which technical and social issues are intertwined. Using Boston's experience with K-12 school choice reform over the last half century...

Eric Posner and Glen Weyl's Radical Markets is dedicated to Vickrey and opens with a preface titled “The Auction Will Set You Free.” Vickrey's ideas offer a middle ground, according to Posner and Weyl, between the Right's view that markets must be “strengthened, expanded and purified”...

Can mechanism design save democracy? We propose a simple design that offers a chance: individuals pay for as many votes as they wish using a number of "voice credits" quadratic in the votes they buy. Only quadratic cost induces marginal costs linear in votes purchased and thus welfare optimality...

This online appendix proves the central result in Lalley and Weyl (Forthcoming). The full text PDF for "Qaudratic Voting: How Mechanism Design Can Radicalize Democracy" may be found here: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2003531