Rachael Colley: Solving inconsistent delegations in liquid democracy

29 novembre 21

Thursday, December 2, Room A707 from 13h15 to 14h30.

Abstract: 
Liquid democracy bridges the gap between direct democracy and representative democracy, where the former is time-consuming and the latter can leave voters feeling underrepresented. Liquid democracy allows agents to vote directly on the issue or delegate their vote to another trusted voter. Standard models of liquid democracy focus on how delegations should be assigned when focusing on a single issue. The research I will present extends these standard models to consider multiple interconnected issues. For each issue, agents can choose whether they should vote directly on the issue or to who they should delegate their vote on this issue. The goal of this work is how to determine delegations when they could lead to inconsistent ballots of direct votes with respect to the constraint connecting the issues. When an agent’s delegations lead to inconsistent votes, we need to decide which delegations should not be respected to regain consistency. Intractable optimisation procedures can be used to find a set of rational votes from the agents minimising the number of delegations that are not respected. We propose an alternative way of determining which delegations should not be respected to gain consistent ballots from the agents. These alternative procedures are tractable and use the agents’ priorities over the issues. 

Joint work with Umberto Grandi