Optimizing Viscous Democracy

Ben Armstrong, Shiri Alouf-Heffetz, Nimrod Talmon

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Viscous democracy is a generalization of liquid democracy, a social choice framework in which voters may transitively delegate their votes.In viscous democracy, a”viscosity” factor decreases the weight of a delegation the further it travels, reducing the chance of excessive weight flowing between ideologically misaligned voters.We demonstrate that viscous democracy often significantly improves the quality of group decision-making over liquid democracy.We first show that finding optimal delegations within a viscous setting is NP-hard.However, simulations allow us to explore the practical effects of viscosity.Across social network structures, competence distributions, and delegation mechanisms we find high viscosity reduces the chance of “super-voters” attaining large amounts of weight and increases the number of voters that are able to affect the outcome of elections.This, in turn, improves group accuracy as a whole.As a result, we argue that viscosity should be considered a core component of liquid democracy.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2024
EditorsKate Larson
PublisherInternational Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence
Pages2643-2650
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781956792041
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2024
Event33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2024 - Jeju, Korea, Republic of
Duration: 3 Aug 20249 Aug 2024

Publication series

NameIJCAI International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
ISSN (Print)1045-0823

Conference

Conference33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2024
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CityJeju
Period3/08/249/08/24

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence

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