English

Approval-Based Committee Voting in Practice: A Case Study of (Over-)Representation in the Polkadot Blockchain

Computer Science and Game Theory 2023-12-20 v2 Theoretical Economics

Abstract

We provide the first large-scale data collection of real-world approval-based committee elections. These elections have been conducted on the Polkadot blockchain as part of their Nominated Proof-of-Stake mechanism and contain around one thousand candidates and tens of thousands of (weighted) voters each. We conduct an in-depth study of application-relevant questions, including a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the outcomes returned by different voting rules. Besides considering proportionality measures that are standard in the multiwinner voting literature, we pay particular attention to less-studied measures of overrepresentation, as these are closely related to the security of the Polkadot network. We also analyze how different design decisions such as the committee size affect the examined measures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2312.11408,
  title  = {Approval-Based Committee Voting in Practice: A Case Study of (Over-)Representation in the Polkadot Blockchain},
  author = {Niclas Boehmer and Markus Brill and Alfonso Cevallos and Jonas Gehrlein and Luis Sánchez-Fernández and Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.11408},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Accepted to AAAI'24