{"doi":"10.1145/3732772.3733544","publication_identifier":{"isbn":["9798400718854"]},"date_published":"2025-06-13T00:00:00Z","type":"conference","citation":{"ieee":"K. Chatterjee, S. Gilbert, S. Schmid, J. Svoboda, and M. X. Yeo, “When is liquid democracy possible?: On the manipulation of variance,” in <i>Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing</i>, Huatulco, Mexico, 2025, pp. 241–251.","mla":"Chatterjee, Krishnendu, et al. “When Is Liquid Democracy Possible?: On the Manipulation of Variance.” <i>Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing</i>, ACM, 2025, pp. 241–51, doi:<a href=\"https://doi.org/10.1145/3732772.3733544\">10.1145/3732772.3733544</a>.","ama":"Chatterjee K, Gilbert S, Schmid S, Svoboda J, Yeo MX. When is liquid democracy possible?: On the manipulation of variance. In: <i>Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing</i>. ACM; 2025:241-251. doi:<a href=\"https://doi.org/10.1145/3732772.3733544\">10.1145/3732772.3733544</a>","ista":"Chatterjee K, Gilbert S, Schmid S, Svoboda J, Yeo MX. 2025. When is liquid democracy possible?: On the manipulation of variance. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing. PODC: Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, 241–251.","short":"K. Chatterjee, S. Gilbert, S. Schmid, J. Svoboda, M.X. Yeo, in:, Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, ACM, 2025, pp. 241–251.","apa":"Chatterjee, K., Gilbert, S., Schmid, S., Svoboda, J., &#38; Yeo, M. X. (2025). When is liquid democracy possible?: On the manipulation of variance. In <i>Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing</i> (pp. 241–251). Huatulco, Mexico: ACM. <a href=\"https://doi.org/10.1145/3732772.3733544\">https://doi.org/10.1145/3732772.3733544</a>","chicago":"Chatterjee, Krishnendu, Seth Gilbert, Stefan Schmid, Jakub Svoboda, and Michelle X Yeo. “When Is Liquid Democracy Possible?: On the Manipulation of Variance.” In <i>Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing</i>, 241–51. ACM, 2025. <a href=\"https://doi.org/10.1145/3732772.3733544\">https://doi.org/10.1145/3732772.3733544</a>."},"project":[{"call_identifier":"H2020","name":"Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications","grant_number":"863818","_id":"0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E"}],"_id":"20053","OA_place":"publisher","OA_type":"hybrid","language":[{"iso":"eng"}],"day":"13","quality_controlled":"1","title":"When is liquid democracy possible?: On the manipulation of variance","file":[{"access_level":"open_access","relation":"main_file","creator":"dernst","file_size":783297,"date_created":"2025-08-05T07:15:31Z","file_id":"20122","checksum":"cd628fe54d96e9fc6cc789bb8145422b","date_updated":"2025-08-05T07:15:31Z","content_type":"application/pdf","file_name":"2025_PODC_Chatterjee.pdf","success":1}],"oa_version":"Published Version","year":"2025","tmp":{"legal_code_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","short":"CC BY (4.0)","image":"/images/cc_by.png","name":"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0)"},"department":[{"_id":"KrCh"},{"_id":"KrPi"}],"file_date_updated":"2025-08-05T07:15:31Z","page":"241-251","date_updated":"2025-08-05T07:25:05Z","corr_author":"1","date_created":"2025-07-21T08:18:26Z","publication":"Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing","acknowledgement":"This work was partially supported by MOE-T2EP20122-0014 (DataDriven Distributed Algorithms), German Research Foundation (DFG) project ReNO (SPP 2378) from 2023-2027, ERC CoG 863818 (ForMSMArt) and Austrian Science Fund (FWF) 10.55776/COE12.","month":"06","abstract":[{"lang":"eng","text":"Liquid democracy is a transitive vote delegation mechanism over voting graphs. It enables each voter to delegate their vote(s) to another better-informed voter, with the goal of collectively making a better decision. The question of whether liquid democracy outperforms direct voting has been previously studied in the context of local delegation mechanisms (where voters can only delegate to someone in their neighbourhood) and binary decision problems. It has previously been shown that it is impossible for local delegation mechanisms to outperform direct voting in general graphs. This raises the question: for which classes of graphs do local delegation mechanisms yield good results?\r\nIn this work, we analyse (1) properties of specific graphs and (2) properties of local delegation mechanisms on these graphs, determining where local delegation actually outperforms direct voting. We show that a critical graph property enabling liquid democracy is that the voting outcome of local delegation mechanisms preserves a sufficient amount of variance, thereby avoiding situations where delegation falls behind direct voting1. These insights allow us to prove our main results, namely that there exist local delegation mechanisms that perform no worse and in fact quantitatively better than direct voting in natural graph topologies like complete, random d-regular, and bounded degree graphs, lending a more nuanced perspective to previous impossibility results."}],"ddc":["000"],"ec_funded":1,"main_file_link":[{"open_access":"1","url":"https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/745"}],"publisher":"ACM","status":"public","user_id":"2DF688A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87","conference":{"name":"PODC: Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing","location":"Huatulco, Mexico","start_date":"2025-06-16","end_date":"2025-06-20"},"has_accepted_license":"1","article_processing_charge":"No","publication_status":"published","author":[{"full_name":"Chatterjee, Krishnendu","id":"2E5DCA20-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87","first_name":"Krishnendu","orcid":"0000-0002-4561-241X","last_name":"Chatterjee"},{"last_name":"Gilbert","full_name":"Gilbert, Seth","first_name":"Seth"},{"last_name":"Schmid","first_name":"Stefan","full_name":"Schmid, Stefan"},{"full_name":"Svoboda, Jakub","id":"130759D2-D7DD-11E9-87D2-DE0DE6697425","first_name":"Jakub","orcid":"0000-0002-1419-3267","last_name":"Svoboda"},{"full_name":"Yeo, Michelle X","id":"2D82B818-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87","first_name":"Michelle X","orcid":"0009-0001-3676-4809","last_name":"Yeo"}],"oa":1}