# On Rational Delegations in Liquid Democracy

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08020 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08020/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Feb 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Unravelling multi-agent ranked delegations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13145/) (2021)
- [When Can Liquid Democracy Unveil the Truth?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01828/) (2021)
- [Measuring a Priori Voting Power -- Taking Delegations Seriously](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02462/) (2023)
- [The Cost Perspective of Liquid Democracy: Feasibility and Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02380/) (2025)
- [When Does Delegation Beat Majority? A Delegation-Based Aggregator for Multi-Sample LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08098/) (2026)
- [Computation and Bribery of Voting Power in Delegative Simple Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03692/) (2021)
- [Let's Agree to Agree: Targeting Consensus for Incomplete Preferences through Majority Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00881/) (2022)
- [Pandering in a Flexible Representative Democracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09986/) (2022)
- [Liquid Democracy for Low-Cost Ensemble Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17443/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Liquid democracy is a proxy voting method where proxies are delegable. We propose and study a game-theoretic model of liquid democracy to address the following question: when is it rational for a voter to delegate her vote? We study the existence of pure-strategy Nash equilibria in this model, and how group accuracy is affected by them. We complement these theoretical results by means of agent-based simulations to study the effects of delegations on group's accuracy on variously structured social networks.