Optimizing Viscous Democracy

Optimizing Viscous Democracy

Ben Armstrong, Shiri Alouf-Heffetz, Nimrod Talmon

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2643-2650. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/292

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.
Keywords:
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Computational social choice
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Agent-based simulation and emergence
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: MTA: Web and social networks