Cycles in Liquid Democracy: A Game-Theoretic Justification
Computer Science and Game Theory
2026-07-14 v1
Abstract
A common criticism of liquid democracy within the relevant academic literature is that delegation cycles can occur, seemingly resulting in unused voting power. Yet, practitioners argue that delegation cycles are not only unproblematic but are even formed intentionally by participants. To bring theory closer to reality, we introduce a model that captures this strategic behavior under uncertainty. We study the existence, structure and quality of Nash equilibria, revealing that delegation cycles naturally emerge. To complement these findings, we perform computational experiments using best-response dynamics.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.12610,
title = {Cycles in Liquid Democracy: A Game-Theoretic Justification},
author = {Markus Brill and Rachael Colley and Anne-Marie George and Grzegorz Lisowski and Georgios Papasotiropoulos and Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.12610},
year = {2026}
}