Power and truth in liquid democracy

This thesis studies a young voting method called liquid democracy, in which voters can freely choose to delegate their vote to other voters or directly use their own vote and accrual delegation votes. We mainly address two problems in liquid democracy. The first problem is that when voters decide whether to vote or delegate and to whom they delegate their votes, what level of voting power each voter has. The voting power of a voter denotes the probability that this voter can change the final voting result. We found that when voters care about their voting power, they do not delegate their votes easily. The second problem is whether it is beneficial for the quality of the voting result if voters are allowed to split their votes and delegate them to multiple delegatees, that is, the so-called weighted delegation. Our results show that in terms of the quality of the voting result, weighted delegation makes it possible to optimize the voting result quality, and it is never worse than the traditional single delegatee liquid democracy.