Tracking Truth by Weighting Proxies in Liquid Democracy

We study wisdom of the crowd effects in liquid democracy when agents are allowed to apportion weights to proxies by mixing their delegations. We show that in this setting -- unlike in the standard one where votes are always delegated in full to one proxy -- it becomes possible to identify delegation structures that optimize the truth-tracking accuracy of the group. We contrast this centralized solution with the group accuracy obtained in equilibrium when agents interact by greedily trying to maximize their own individual accuracy through mixed delegations, and study the price of anarchy of these games. While equilibria with mixed delegations may be as bad as in the standard delegations setting, they are never worse and may sometimes be better.