# Unravelling multi-agent ranked delegations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.13145 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13145/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [The Fluid Mechanics of Liquid Democracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01906/) (2018)
- [On Rational Delegations in Liquid Democracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08020/) (2018)
- [Binary Voting with Delegable Proxy: An Analysis of Liquid Democracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08741/) (2017)
- [Power in Liquid Democracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07070/) (2020)
- [Incentivising Participation in Liquid Democracy with Breadth-First Delegation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03710/) (2018)
- [Iterative Delegations in Liquid Democracy with Restricted Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04362/) (2018)
- [Voting Behaviour and Power in Online Democracy: A Study of LiquidFeedback in Germany's Pirate Party](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.07723/) (2015)
- [Proxy Voting for Better Outcomes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08308/) (2016)
- [Resolving multi-proxy transitive vote delegation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.4039/) (2014)
- [Foundations of e-Democracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.02873/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Measuring a Priori Voting Power -- Taking Delegations Seriously](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02462/) (2023)
- [As Time Goes By: Adding a Temporal Dimension Towards Resolving Delegations in Liquid Democracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12898/) (2023)
- [Snowveil: A Framework for Decentralised Preference Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18444/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a voting model with multi-agent ranked delegations. This model generalises liquid democracy in two aspects: first, an agent's delegation can use the votes of multiple other agents to determine their own -- for instance, an agent's vote may correspond to the majority outcome of the votes of a trusted group of agents; second, agents can submit a ranking over multiple delegations, so that a backup delegation can be used when their preferred delegations are involved in cycles. The main focus of this paper is the study of unravelling procedures that transform the delegation ballots received from the agents into a profile of direct votes, from which a winning alternative can then be determined by using a standard voting rule. We propose and study six such unravelling procedures, two based on optimisation and four using a greedy approach. We study both algorithmic and axiomatic properties, as well as related computational complexity problems of our unravelling procedures for different restrictions on the types of ballots that the agents can submit.