Liquid Democracy: An Algorithmic Perspective

Kahng, Anson; Mackenzie, Simon; Procaccia, Ariel D.

doi:10.1613/jair.1.12261

Cited by 33 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Less informed voters by delegating their votes to more informed agents, enhance the electoral impact of more informed voters (which is desirable), but also remove valuable pieces of information from the aggregation procedure (which is undesirable). This observation is, arguably, of independent interest, since the literature has paid special attention to this trade-off of delegation and tried to assess its sign under alternative behavioral assumptions (see, Kahng et al, 2018). Our work demonstrates rational individuals who choose behaviors endogenously to maximise their individual welfare, can gain from being allowed to delegate votes, despite the partially adverse consequences of vote concentration.…”

Section: Auxiliary Gamementioning

confidence: 74%

“…In such a setting delegation introduces an additional dilemma: when less informed -yet, not completely uninformed-voters delegate their votes to more informed ones (even if they know who they are), then the electoral impact of more informed voters increases (which is desirable), but pieces of valuable information are left out of the aggregation process (which is undesirable). Whether the net effect of delegation is positive or negative, depends on the exact behavior employed by the voters (Kahng et al, 2018). We prove that the game with delegation admits an equilibrium that is weakly better compared to all equilibria of the game without delegation, even in the presence of such an additional complication.…”

Section: Liquid Democracymentioning

confidence: 85%

“…Christoff and Grossi (2017) focuses on the aggregation of individual choices to social choice and the unintended effects of delegation on the rationality postulates satisfied by direct voting. Kahng et al (2018) show that when voters delegate only to more informed voters who are within their local network, then delegation can lead to worse outcomes than simple majority voting. They argue that if alternative behavioral assumptions are imposed then delegation can lead to better outcomes.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 96%

“…1 In contrast, we show that delegation can improve on simple majority voting with abstention in elections of any size, with and without private information on voter types. Christoff and Grossi (2017) and Kahng et al (2018) also study information aggregation with delegated voting, but do not employ an equilibrium approach. Christoff and Grossi (2017) focuses on the aggregation of individual choices to social choice and the unintended effects of delegation on the rationality postulates satisfied by direct voting.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

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Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes

Dhillon¹,

Kotsialou²,

Xefteris³

2021

Preprint

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Recent developments in blockchain technology have made possible greater progress on secure electronic voting, opening the way to better ways of democratic decision making. In this paper we formalise the features of ``liquid democracy'' which allows voters to delegate their votes to other voters, and we explore whether it improves information aggregation as compared to direct voting. We consider a two-alternative setup with truth-seeking voters (informed and uninformed) and partisan ones (leftists and rightists), and we show that delegation improves information aggregation in finite elections. We also propose a mechanism that further improves the information aggregation properties of delegation in private information settings, by guaranteeing that all vote transfers are from uninformed to informed truth-seeking voters. Delegation offers effective ways for truth-seeking uninformed voters to boost the vote-share of the alternative that matches the state of the world in all considered setups and hence deserves policy makers' attention.

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Section: Auxiliary Gamementioning

confidence: 74%

Section: Liquid Democracymentioning

confidence: 85%

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes

Dhillon¹,

Kotsialou²,

Xefteris³

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…On the positive side, Green-Armytage (2015) showed that, in a specific spatial voting setting, transitive delegations decrease an expected loss measuring how well the votes represent the voters. On the other hand, Kahng, Mackenzie, and Procaccia (2018), studied a binary election with a ground truth. In their model, no "local" procedure (i.e., a procedure working locally on the SN to organize delegations) can guarantee that LD is, at the same time, never less accurate and sometimes strictly more accurate than direct voting.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Iterative Delegations in Liquid Democracy with Restricted Preferences

Escoffier¹,

Gilbert²,

Pass-Lanneau³

2020

AAAI

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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.

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The Convergence of Iterative Delegations in Liquid Democracy in a Social Network

Escoffier

Gilbert²,

Pass-Lanneau³

2019

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Liquid democracy is a collective decision making paradigm which lies between direct and representative democracy. One of its main features is that voters can delegate their votes in a transitive manner such that: A delegates to B and B delegates to C leads to A indirectly delegates to C. These delegations can be effectively empowered by implementing liquid democracy in a social network, so that voters can delegate their votes to any of their neighbors in the network. However, it is uncertain that such a delegation process will lead to a stable state where all voters are satisfied with the people representing them. We study the stability (w.r.t. voters preferences) of the delegation process in liquid democracy and model it as a game in which the players are the voters and the strategies are their possible delegations. We answer several questions on the equilibria of this process in any social network or in social networks that correspond to restricted types of graphs.We show that a Nash-equilibrium may not exist, and that it is even NP-complete to decide whether one exists or not. This holds even if the social network is a complete graph or a bounded degree graph. We further show that this existence problem is W[1]-hard w.r.t. the treewidth of the social network. Besides these hardness results, we demonstrate that an equilibrium always exists whatever the preferences of the voters iff the social network is a tree. We design a dynamic programming procedure to determine some desirable equilibria (e.g., minimizing the dissatisfaction of the voters) in polynomial time for tree social networks. Lastly, we study the convergence of delegation dynamics. Unfortunately, when an equilibrium exists, we show that a best response dynamics may not converge, even if the social network is a path or a complete graph.Aim of this paper. In this work, we tackle the problem of the stability of the delegation process in the LD setting. Indeed, it is likely that the preferences of voters over possible gurus will be motivated by different criteria and possibly contrary opinions. Hence, the iterative process where each voter chooses her delegate may end up in an unstable situation, i.e., a situation in which some voters would change their delegations. A striking example to illustrate this point is to consider an election where the voters could be positioned on the real line in a way that represents their right-wing left-wing political identity. If voters are ideologically close enough, each voter, starting from the left-side, could agree to delegate to her closest neighbor on her right. By transitivity, this would lead to all voters, including the extreme-left voters, having an extreme-right voter for guru. These unstable situations raise the questions: "Under what conditions do the iterative delegations of the voters always reach an equilibrium? Does such an equilibrium even exist? Can we determine equilibria that are more desirable than others?".We assume that voters are part of an SN represented by an undirected graph so that they can o...

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Liquid Democracy: An Algorithmic Perspective

Cited by 33 publications

References 12 publications

Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes

Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes

Iterative Delegations in Liquid Democracy with Restricted Preferences

The Convergence of Iterative Delegations in Liquid Democracy in a Social Network

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