Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes

Amrita Dhillon, Grammateia Kotsialou, Dilip Ravindran and Dimitrios Xefteris
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Amrita Dhillon: King’s College, London
Grammateia Kotsialou: London School of Economics
Dilip Ravindran: Humboldt University of Berlin

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: Liquid democracy is a system that combines aspects of direct democracy and representative democracy by allowing voters to either vote directly themselves, or delegate their votes to others. In this paper we study the information aggregation properties of liquid democracy in a setting with heterogeneously informed truth-seeking voters—who want the election outcome to match an underlying state of the world—and partisan voters. We establish that liquid democracy admits equilibria which improve welfare and information aggregation over direct and representative democracy when voters’ preferences and information precisions are publicly or privately known. Liquid democracy also admits equilibria which do worse than the other two systems. We discuss features of efficient and inefficient equilibria and provide conditions under which voters can more easily coordinate on the efficient equilibria in liquid democracy than the other two systems.

Keywords: Liquid democracy; delegation; strategic voting; information aggregation; Condorcet Jury theorem JEL Classification: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mic and nep-pol
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https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/c ... tions/wp665.2023.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Information aggregation with delegation of votes (2023)
Working Paper: Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cge:wacage:665

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