Iterative Delegations in Liquid Democracy with Restricted Preferences

Abstract Liquid democracy is a collective decision making paradigm which lies between direct and representative democracy. One main feature of liquid democracy is that voters can delegate their votes in a transitive manner so that: A delegates to B and B delegates to C leads to A delegates to C. Unfortunately, because voters' preferences over delegates may be conflicting, this process may not converge. There may not even exist a stable state (also called equilibrium). In this paper, we investigate the stability of the delegation process in liquid democracy when voters have restricted types of preference on the agent representing them (e.g., single-peaked preferences). We show that various natural structures of preference guarantee the existence of an equilibrium and we obtain both tractability and hardness results for the problem of computing several equilibria with some desirable properties.