Dominant Assurance Contracts for Book Reviews and Blog Posts

Arjun Panickssery at LessWrong is experimenting with dominant assurance contracts as a way to fund the public goods of blog posts and book reviews.

In theory, writers could kickstart posts using dominant assurance contracts. An example (this is a real offer): If you send $20 to arjun.panickssery at Gmail via PayPal by noon New York time on January 21^st, I’ll send you back $25 if fewer than 10 people sent me money. If 10 or more people send me money, I’ll post a review of Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by the end of the month.

If you think this won’t work you should definitely send him some money.