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Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes

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  • Dhillon, Amrita

    (King’s College, London)

  • Kotsialou, Grammateia

    (London School of Economics)

  • Ravindran, Dilip

    (Humboldt University of Berlin)

  • Xefteris, Dimitrios

    (University of Cyprus)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Dhillon, Amrita & Kotsialou, Grammateia & Ravindran, Dilip & Xefteris, Dimitrios, 2023. "Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 665, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    • Handle: RePEc:cge:wacage:665
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    1. Dhillon, Amrita & Kotsialou, Grammateia & Xefteris, Dimitris, 2021. "Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes," SocArXiv ubk7p, Center for Open Science.

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    Keywords

    Liquid democracy; delegation; strategic voting; information aggregation; Condorcet Jury theorem JEL Classification: D72;
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