IJCAI 20260 citations
Cycles in Liquid Democracy: A Game-Theoretic Justification
Markus Brill, Rachael Colley, Anne-Marie George, Grzegorz Lisowski, Georgios Papasotiropoulos, Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin
Abstract
A common criticism of liquid democracy within the relevant academic literature is that delegation cycles can occur, seemingly resulting in unused voting power. Yet, practitioners argue that delegation cycles are not only unproblematic but are even formed intentionally by participants. To bring theory closer to reality, we introduce a model that captures this strategic behavior under uncertainty. We study the existence, structure and quality of Nash equilibria, revealing that delegation cycles naturally emerge. To complement these findings, we perform computational experiments using best-response dynamics.
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Computational social choiceGame Theory and Economic Paradigms: Noncooperative games
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ijcai2026_cyclesinliquidde,
title = {Cycles in Liquid Democracy: A Game-Theoretic Justification},
author = {Markus Brill and Rachael Colley and Anne-Marie George and Grzegorz Lisowski and Georgios Papasotiropoulos and Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin},
booktitle = {IJCAI 2026},
year = {2026}
}