---
type: source
title: "Robin Hanson 'Futarchy Details' — Open Research Questions from Futarchy's Inventor"
author: "Robin Hanson"
url: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/futarchy-details
date: 2024-01-01
domain: internet-finance
secondary_domains: [mechanisms, collective-intelligence]
format: blog-post
status: processed
priority: high
tags: [futarchy, robin-hanson, open-questions, mechanism-design, redistribution, information-revelation]
---

## Content

Robin Hanson's "Futarchy Details" on Overcoming Bias identifies the open research questions he considers unresolved for futarchy implementation. As futarchy's inventor, his identification of open problems is authoritative on the state of theoretical vs. empirical knowledge in the field.

**Open questions Hanson identifies:**

1. **Redistribution** (described as "the hardest issue I know of, where I'm still not sure what to do"): A majority holder could propose investing additional funds while claiming majority ownership. If total capital increases, markets approve — but this is wealth transfer, not value creation. Futarchy's metric-optimization doesn't distinguish between the two. Hanson suggests organizations may need external "laws and social norms that limit redistribution proposals" — acknowledging that principled mechanisms remain underdeveloped.

2. **Statistical noise** — "how to decide if the price difference is big enough to conclude it isn't just noise." Small conditional market price differences may not represent genuine belief differentials. MetaDAO's $58K average proposal volume raises this concern empirically.

3. **Information revelation timing** — managing when speculators reveal information to prevent gaming the decision window. If participants know when the conditional market closes, they can time their revelation to prevent others from trading against their information.

4. **Agenda control** — whether proposal auctions and subsidy structures adequately prevent bad proposals from slipping through. Bad actors can spam proposals to exhaust governance attention.

**What Hanson does NOT identify as open:**
Notably, Hanson does not identify the basic information acquisition and strategic revelation mechanism (Mechanism B in the KB's terminology) as an open research question. His framework treats skin-in-the-game generating private information acquisition as a structural feature of financial markets, not a contested hypothesis. His open questions are about the governance design layer built ON TOP of this mechanism.

**Context:**
This piece is distinct from the META-036 research proposal (which targets "information-aggregation efficiency" experimentally). Taken together: Hanson treats Mechanism B as theoretically established but the aggregation process as empirically open. The META-036 study is testing whether the theoretical mechanism actually produces better decisions in controlled settings — a different (and empirically more tractable) question.

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** Hanson's identification of redistribution as "the hardest issue I know of" confirms the KB claim [[Redistribution proposals are futarchys hardest unsolved problem]]. But more importantly: his SILENCE on information acquisition as an open question is a secondary type of evidence. If futarchy's inventor doesn't treat Mechanism B as contested, that's implicit support for the Session 9 resolution.

**What surprised me:** The redistribution problem as described maps closely to what I'd call the "governance attack surface" — it's not just about redistributive proposals but about the inability of a price-optimization mechanism to distinguish "total value goes up because of wealth transfer" from "total value goes up because of genuine value creation." This is a deeper problem than I had noted in the KB.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Any acknowledgment by Hanson that participation concentration (the ~50 active traders = most of the market) affects his theoretical models. His open questions assume competitive market participation; the concentration finding from Session 8 is a practical constraint his theoretical work doesn't address.

**KB connections:**
- [[Redistribution proposals are futarchys hardest unsolved problem because they can increase measured welfare while reducing productive value creation]] — this piece is a primary source for this claim; can be added as direct evidence
- [[MetaDAOs futarchy implementation shows limited trading volume in uncontested decisions]] — statistical noise problem is the theoretical basis for why thin markets fail the mechanism
- [[speculative markets aggregate information through incentive and selection effects not wisdom of crowds]] — Hanson's framing of information revelation timing and agenda control adds scope conditions not currently in this claim

**Extraction hints:**
- Enrichment of [[Redistribution proposals are futarchys hardest unsolved problem]]: Add Hanson's redistribution attack structure (wealth transfer indistinguishable from value creation in price-optimization metric)
- New claim candidate: "Futarchy's information revelation timing problem creates a strategic advantage for last-movers who can observe the conditional price before revealing private information, undermining the information aggregation mechanism at small market sizes"
- This is a specific, archivable scope condition for when information aggregation fails even in a functional market

## Curator Notes
PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[Redistribution proposals are futarchys hardest unsolved problem because they can increase measured welfare while reducing productive value creation]]
WHY ARCHIVED: Primary source for understanding Hanson's own conception of futarchy's theoretical gaps; the silence on Mechanism B as an open question is as informative as the explicit open questions he names
EXTRACTION HINT: Prioritize the redistribution attack structure (wealth transfer indistinguishable from value creation) as an enrichment to the existing redistribution claim. The information revelation timing candidate is new.
