TY - GEN
T1 - Optimizing Viscous Democracy
AU - Armstrong, Ben
AU - Alouf-Heffetz, Shiri
AU - Talmon, Nimrod
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.
PY - 2024/1/1
Y1 - 2024/1/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85204293115&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85204293115
T3 - IJCAI International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
SP - 2643
EP - 2650
BT - Proceedings of the 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2024
A2 - Larson, Kate
PB - International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence
T2 - 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2024
Y2 - 3 August 2024 through 9 August 2024
ER -