Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes

Amrita Dhillon (), Grammateia Kotsialou and Dimitrios Xefteris

No ubk7p, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Recent developments in blockchain technology have made possible greater progress on secure electronic voting, opening the way to better ways of democratic decision making. In this paper we formalise the features of ``liquid democracy'' which allows voters to delegate their votes to other voters, and we explore whether it improves information aggregation as compared to direct voting. We consider a two-alternative setup with truth-seeking voters (informed and uninformed) and partisan ones (leftists and rightists), and we show that delegation improves information aggregation in finite elections. We also propose a mechanism that further improves the information aggregation properties of delegation in private information settings, by guaranteeing that all vote transfers are from uninformed to informed truth-seeking voters. Delegation offers effective ways for truth-seeking uninformed voters to boost the vote-share of the alternative that matches the state of the world in all considered setups and hence deserves policy makers' attention.

Date: 2021-01-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-des, nep-mic, nep-pay and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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https://osf.io/download/60e59514924b40003f4ee30d/

Related works:
Working Paper: Information aggregation with delegation of votes (2023)
Working Paper: Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:ubk7p

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/ubk7p

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