Vote Delegation with Unknown Preferences

TL;DR

This paper analyzes vote delegation with private preferences, showing that free delegation tends to favor minorities and that increasing delegators eventually aligns outcomes with conventional voting.

Contribution

It reveals how private preferences and delegation constraints influence election outcomes, extending understanding of vote delegation dynamics.

Findings

Free delegation favors minority outcomes.

Capped voting rights also favor minorities.

As delegators increase, outcomes converge to traditional voting results.

Abstract

We examine vote delegation when preferences of agents are private information. One group of agents (delegators) does not want to participate in voting and abstains under conventional voting or can delegate its votes to the other group (voters) who decide between two alternatives. We show that free delegation favors minorities, that is, alternatives that have a lower chance of winning ex-ante. The same occurs if the number of voting rights that actual voters can have is capped. When the number of delegators increases, the probability that the ex-ante minority wins under free and capped delegation converges to the one under conventional voting--albeit non-monotonically. Our results are obtained in a private value setting but can be readily translated into an information aggregation setting when voters receive a signal about the ''correct" alternative with some probability.