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The fluid mechanics of liquid democracy. (English) Zbl 1443.91127

Christodoulou, George (ed.) et al., Web and Internet economics. 14th international conference, WINE 2018, Oxford, UK, December 15–17, 2018. Proceedings. Cham: Springer. Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 11316, 188-202 (2018).
Summary: Liquid democracy is the principle of making collective decisions by letting agents transitively delegate their votes. Despite its significant appeal, it has become apparent that a weakness of liquid democracy is that a small subset of agents may gain massive influence. To address this, we propose to change the current practice by allowing agents to specify multiple delegation options instead of just one. Much like in nature, where – fluid mechanics teaches us – liquid maintains an equal level in connected vessels, so do we seek to control the flow of votes in a way that balances influence as much as possible. Specifically, we analyze the problem of choosing delegations to approximately minimize the maximum number of votes entrusted to any agent, by drawing connections to the literature on confluent flow. We also introduce a random graph model for liquid democracy, and use it to demonstrate the benefits of our approach both theoretically and empirically.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1429.91007].

MSC:

91B12 Voting theory
91F10 History, political science
76A02 Foundations of fluid mechanics
05C90 Applications of graph theory
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