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

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Algorithmic Game Theory (SAGT 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11801))

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Abstract

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 so 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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that similarly to [10], we develop a setting where candidates are not mentioned. Proceeding in this way enables a general approach encapsulating different ways of specifying how candidates structure the preferences of voters over gurus.

  2. 2.

    Often termed better response dynamics.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by the Italian MIUR PRIN 2017 Project ALGADIMAR “Algorithms, Games, and Digital Markets” and the French ANR Project 14-CE24-0007-01 CoCoRICo-CoDec.

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Correspondence to Hugo Gilbert .

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Escoffier, B., Gilbert, H., Pass-Lanneau, A. (2019). The Convergence of Iterative Delegations in Liquid Democracy in a Social Network. In: Fotakis, D., Markakis, E. (eds) Algorithmic Game Theory. SAGT 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11801. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30473-7_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30473-7_19

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