{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Optimizing Viscous Democracy","authors":[{"name":"Ben Armstrong","slug":"ben-armstrong","given":"Ben","family":"Armstrong","affiliation":"University of Waterloo"},{"name":"Shiri Alouf-Heffetz","slug":"shiri-alouf-heffetz","given":"Shiri","family":"Alouf-Heffetz","affiliation":"Ben-Gurion University"},{"name":"Nimrod Talmon","slug":"nimrod-talmon","given":"Nimrod","family":"Talmon","affiliation":"Ben-Gurion University"}],"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.\r\nWe 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.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2024/292","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2024/292","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2024/0292.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2024/292.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2024/bibtex/292","volume":{"slug":"2024","title":"Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2024","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2024/","year":2024,"location":"Jeju, Korea","dates":"3-9 August 2024","editors":"Kate Larson","isbn":"978-1-956792-04-1","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2024"},"section":"Game Theory and Economic Paradigms","track":"Main Track","number":292,"pages":{"first":2643,"last":2650},"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"],"videos":[],"references":[{"position":1,"raw":"[Albert and Barabási, 2002] Réka Albert and Albert-László Barabási. 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