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Vote Delegation with Unknown Preferences

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  • Hans Gersbach
  • Akaki Mamageishvili
  • Manvir Schneider

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.

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  • Hans Gersbach & Akaki Mamageishvili & Manvir Schneider, 2021. "Vote Delegation with Unknown Preferences," Papers 2102.08835, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2021.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2102.08835
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Roger B. Myerson, 1998. "Population uncertainty and Poisson games," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 27(3), pages 375-392.
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