The Fluid Mechanics of Liquid Democracy

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

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-04612-5_13

Cited by 33 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 15 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Notably, a paper by Gölz et al (2018) studies the question of reducing the maximum weight of any voter in liquid democracy systems by permitting voters to specify multiple delegation options and then allowing a mechanism to resolve these delegations. Under a probabilistic model of delegation behavior based on preferential attachment, they establish a doublyexponential asymptotic separation between the expected maximum weight of a voter in the single delegation and multiple delegation settings.…”

Section: Subsequent Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Liquid Democracy: An Algorithmic Perspective

Kahng

Mackenzie

Procaccia

2021

jair

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We study liquid democracy, a collective decision making paradigm that allows voters to transitively delegate their votes, through an algorithmic lens. In our model, there are two alternatives, one correct and one incorrect, and we are interested in the probability that the majority opinion is correct. Our main question is whether there exist delegation mechanisms that are guaranteed to outperform direct voting, in the sense of being always at least as likely, and sometimes more likely, to make a correct decision. Even though we assume that voters can only delegate their votes to better-informed voters, we show that local delegation mechanisms, which only take the local neighborhood of each voter as input (and, arguably, capture the spirit of liquid democracy), cannot provide the foregoing guarantee. By contrast, we design a non-local delegation mechanism that does provably outperform direct voting under mild assumptions about voters.

show abstract

Section: Subsequent Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Liquid Democracy: An Algorithmic Perspective

Kahng

Mackenzie

Procaccia

2021

jair

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…They focus on network theoretic properties emerging from the structure of delegations-with particular attention to the number of highly influential gurus or 'super-voters'. Inspired by their experimental analysis, Gölz et al (2018) propose and analyze a variant of the liquid democracy scheme able to restrict reliance on super-voters. Skowron et al (2017) study an aspect of the Liquid Feedback platform concerning the order in which proposals are ranked and by which they are brought to the attention of the community.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Rational Delegations in Liquid Democracy

Bloembergen

Grossi

Lackner

2019

AAAI

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Liquid democracy is a proxy voting method where proxies are delegable. We propose and study a game-theoretic model of liquid democracy to address the following question: when is it rational for a voter to delegate her vote? We study the existence of pure-strategy Nash equilibria in this model, and how group accuracy is affected by them. We complement these theoretical results by means of agent-based simulations to study the effects of delegations on group's accuracy on variously structured social networks. * This paper (without Appendix) appears in the proceedings of AAAI'19. We are indebted to the anonymous reviewers of IJCAI/ECAI'18 and AAAI'19 for many helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. We are also grateful to the participants of the LAMSADE seminar at Paris Dauphine University, and the THEMA seminar at University Cergy-Pontoise where this work was presented, for many helpful comments and suggestions. Daan Bloembergen has received funding in the framework of the joint programming initiative ERA-

show abstract

“…A natural optimization problem here is to compute a popular branching where no tree is large. In liquid democracy, a large-sized tree shows a high concentration of power in the hands of a single voter, and this is harmful for social welfare [20]. When there is a fixed subset of root nodes in a directed graph, it was shown in [20] that it is NP-hard to find a branching that minimizes the size of the largest tree.…”

Section: Theorem 13 Let G Be a Digraph On N Nodes And M Edges Where Every Node Has A Weak Ranking Over Its Incoming Edges The Popular Bramentioning

confidence: 99%

Popular branchings and their dual certificates

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Let G be a digraph where every node has preferences over its incoming edges. The preferences of a node extend naturally to preferences over branchings, i.e., directed forests; a branching B is popular if B does not lose a head-to-head election (where nodes cast votes) against any branching. Such popular branchings have a natural application in liquid democracy. The popular branching problem is to decide if G admits a popular branching or not. We give a characterization of popular branchings in terms of dual certificates and use this characterization to design an efficient combinatorial algorithm for the popular branching problem. When preferences are weak rankings, we use our characterization to formulate the popular branching polytope in the original space and also show that our algorithm can be modified to compute a branching with least unpopularity margin. When preferences are strict rankings, we show that “approximately popular” branchings always exist.

show abstract

The Fluid Mechanics of Liquid Democracy

Cited by 33 publications

References 15 publications

Liquid Democracy: An Algorithmic Perspective

Liquid Democracy: An Algorithmic Perspective

On Rational Delegations in Liquid Democracy

Popular branchings and their dual certificates

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About