Iterative Delegations in Liquid Democracy with Restricted Preferences

Abstract

Liquid democracy is a collective decision making paradigm which lies between direct and representative democracy. One main feature of liquid democracy is that voters can delegate their votes in a transitive manner so that: A delegates to B and B delegates to C leads to A delegates to C. Unfortunately, because voters' preferences over delegates may be conflicting, this process may not converge. There may not even exist a stable state (also called equilibrium). In this paper, we investigate the stability of the delegation process in liquid democracy when voters have restricted types of preference on the agent representing them (e.g., single-peaked preferences). We show that various natural structures of preference guarantee the existence of an equilibrium and we obtain both tractability and hardness results for the problem of computing several equilibria with some desirable properties.

Unravelling Expressive Delegations: Complexity and Normative Analysis

“…There is also a substantial body of work on liquid democracy in the setting with ground truth (Kahng, Mackenzie, and Procaccia 2021;Gölz et al 2021;Caragiannis and Micha 2019;Becker et al 2021;Alouf-Heffetz et al 2022), as well as on game-theoretic aspects of delegation (Bloembergen, Grossi, and Lackner 2019;Escoffier, Gilbert, and Pass-Lanneau 2020;Zhang and Grossi 2021).…”

Tracking Truth by Weighting Proxies in Liquid Democracy

“…Second, a number of papers have focused on the development of better behaved delegation schemes, e.g. : delegations with preferences over trustees [7] or over gurus [15,16]; multiple delegations [19]; complex delegations like delegations to a majority of trustees [11]; dampened delegations [6]; breadth-first delegations [23]. Third, papers have focused on computational aspects of some of the themes mentioned above, like the computation of equilibria in delegation games [16].…”

Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes

“…Since the creation of the Ethereum blockchain (Wood, 2014), Turing-complete 1 smart contracts can be placed on a blockchain. This means that any mechanism design can be enforced via smart contracts, including the vote transfer mechanism that we describe in this paper and, of course, other delegation mechanisms of votes in the context of liquid democracy (see Kotsialou and Riley, 2020, Colley et al, 2020, Escoffier et al, 2020, Brill and Talmon, 2018, Gölz et al, 2018, Boldi et al, 2011. Note that blockchain experts have already started experimenting by building voting mechanisms on blockchains, with some of the first examples including the following: McCorry et al (2017) uses smart contracts to avoid using any trusted authority to either complete the tally or protect the voters' privacy, Riley et al (2019) show how smart contracts are used to keep track of company shareholdings, allowing for real-time elections on company matters in a decentralised manner on the blockchain.…”