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.
Cycles in Liquid Democracy: A Game-Theoretic Justification
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）；University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学）；University of Warsaw（华沙大学）；TU Eindhoven（埃因霍温理工大学）
Power in Liquid Democracy: A Network Centrality Approach
University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Association for Interactive Democracy（互动民主协会）；University of Warsaw（华沙大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Liquid democracy under vote correlation: On the fallacies of averaging and the excluded middle
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；TU Berlin（柏林工业大学）；Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院）；Aarhus University（奥胡斯大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
