Colloquium Artificial Intelligence - Prof. dr. Davide Grossi

Title:
Foundations for Liquid Democracy

Abstract:
Liquid democracy is a proxy voting method where proxies are delegable: individual A may delegate her vote to B, who in turn may delegate it to C and so on. Ultimately, an individual’s vote carries the weight given by the number of other individuals who (directly or indirectly) entrusted her as proxy.
Liquid democracy has been used and popularised by a number of parties (e.g, the Piratenpartei in Germany, the Demoex Party in Sweden), associations and grassroots initiatives for democratic reforms (e.g., Interaktive Demokratie, Liquid US, Democracy Earth Foundation). Yet little scientific work exists on it.
In this talk I will present recent work aiming at providing theoretical foundations for this novel voting method from the perspective of social choice theory, network theory, and game theory. The talk presents joint work with Zoé Christoff (Bayreuth), Daan Bloembergen (CWI Amsterdam) and Martin Lackner (TU Wien).