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Title: Liquid Democracy: An Algorithmic Perspective
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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2007080 2024287 1733556
NSF-PAR ID:
10250703
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
Volume:
70
ISSN:
1076-9757
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1223 to 1252
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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