Liquid FM: Recommending Music through Viscous Democracy

Most modern recommendation systems use the approach of collaborative filtering: users that are believed to behave alike are used to produce recommendations. In this work we describe an application (Liquid FM) taking a completely different approach. Liquid FM is a music recommendation system that makes the user responsible for the recommended items. Suggestions are the result of a voting scheme, employing the idea of viscous democracy. Liquid FM can also be thought of as the first testbed for this voting system. In this paper we outline the design and architecture of the application, both from the theoretical and from the implementation viewpoints

On Rational Delegations in Liquid Democracy

Liquid democracy is a proxy voting method where proxies are delegable. We propose and study a game-theoretic model of liquid democracy to address the following question: when is it rational for a voter to delegate her vote? We study the existence of pure-strategy Nash equilibria in this model, and how group accuracy is affected by them. We complement these theoretical results by means of agent-based simulations to study the effects of delegations on group's accuracy on variously structured social networks.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures. This paper (without Appendix) appears in the proceedings of AAAI'1

Analysis of a networked social algorithm for collective selection of a committee of representatives

A recent work by Hern\'andez et al. introduced a networked voting rule supported by a trust-based social network, where indications of possible representatives were based on individuals opinions. Individual contributions went beyond a simple vote-counting and were based on proxy voting. These mechanisms generated a high level of representativeness of the selected committee, weakening the possibility of relations of patronage. By incorporating the integrity of individuals and its perception, here we address the question of the trustability of the resulting committee. Our results show that this voting rule provides high representativeness for small committees with a high level of integrity. Furthermore, the voting system displays robustness to a strategic and untruthful application of the voting algorithm.Comment: 7 pages and 8 figures. Submitted for publication. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1801.0539

Iterative Delegations in Liquid Democracy with Restricted Preferences

In this paper, we study liquid democracy, a collective decision making paradigm which lies between direct and representative democracy. One main feature of liquid democracy is that voters can delegate their votes in a transitive manner so that: A delegates to B and B delegates to C leads to A delegates to C. Unfortunately, this process may not converge as there may not even exist a stable state (also called equilibrium). In this paper, we investigate the stability of the delegation process in liquid democracy when voters have restricted types of preference on the agent representing them (e.g., single-peaked preferences). We show that various natural structures of preferences guarantee the existence of an equilibrium and we obtain both tractability and hardness results for the problem of computing several equilibria with some desirable properties

Transition to Market Economy in Eastern Europe: Interest Groups and Political Institutions in Russia

The article analyzes the causes of the incoherent reformprogram in Russia in the last decade. It argues that the slow and partial policies can be attributed to a viscous combination of lobbyism and constitutional design. Because the post-communist transitions after 1989 were non violent “velvet revolutions,” the old state monopolies were not removed. State monopolies have small-group advantages in contrast to the large group of private firms, which are numerous and not yet organized. It leads to an asymmetrical pattern of lobbyism in favor of non-transition, which can only be mitigated by establishing dispersed political institutions, that can raise the price on rent-seeking. In Russia the centralized political institutions of the past were not replaced. Hence, Russia inherited both interest groups and political institutions of the late communist era – an unfortunate starting point for carrying out comprehensive economic reforms. Free trade with the West and potential competition may put pressure on the old state monopolies. However, lobbies in the European Union may oppose free trade to maintain their monopoly.

Climate Justice, Gender, and Intersectionality

Women are generally more vulnerable than men to environmental disasters and extreme weather events due to four main factors, which are related to women’s gendered roles in society: women are economically disadvantaged in comparison to men and are more likely to live in poverty; sexual and reproductive health and physical demands on their bodies during pregnancy, child-bearing and rearing, and menopause put them at special risk; their lives tend to be longer and they spend more time as seniors / widows, with resulting economic and health implications; and their social options are restricted so that they often fill paid and unpaid roles related to physical and emotional caring that put them at special risk of environmental injustice. This means that environmental and climate injustice are gendered in both rich and poor countries, and this can be manifested in a variety of ways: housing, transportation, food insecurity, stress, mental illness, disability, heat exposure, interruptions of electricity and water services, violence against women, partner and elder violence, toxic exposure, health vulnerability, worker safety, political voice/agency/leadership, and many others. Gender also intersects with other categories of vulnerability such as ethnicity, ‘race,’ sexuality, dis/ability, etc. to heighten climate risk and injustice. The gendered effects of extreme weather events are often not disaggregated in government statistics and research literature, and an explicit gender focus, including attention to the access of women and marginalized people to participation in climate policy setting, has been minimal. Both at the local level and globally, climate change adaptation and response initiatives can downplay or suppress democratic, equity-enhancing politics.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, FRN IDRC and SSHRC File Agreement No. 2017-0082 and IDRC GRANT NO. 106002-00

On rational delegations in liquid democracy

Liquid democracy is a proxy voting method where proxies are delegable. We propose and study a game-theoretic model of liquid democracy to address the following question: when is it rational for a voter to delegate her vote? We study the existence of pure-strategy Nash equilibria in this model, and how group accuracy is affected by them. We complement these theoretical results by means of agent-based simulations to study the effects of delegations on group's accuracy on variously structured social networks

On rational delegations in liquid democracy

Liquid democracy is a proxy voting method where proxies are delegable. We propose and study a game-theoretic model of liquid democracy to address the following question: when is it rational for a voter to delegate her vote? We study the existence of pure-strategy Nash equilibria in this model, and how group accuracy is affected by them. We complement these theoretical results by means of agent-based simulations to study the effects of delegations on group's accuracy on variously structured social networks

Google Votes: A Liquid Democracy Experiment on a Corporate Social Network

This paper introduces Google Votes, an experiment in liquid democracy built on Google\u27s internal corporate Google+ social network. Liquid democracy decision-making systems can scale to cover large groups by enabling voters to delegate their votes to other voters. This approach is in contrast to direct democracy systems where voters vote directly on issues, and representative democracy systems where voters elect representatives to vote on issues for them. Liquid democracy systems can provide many of the benefits of both direct and representative democracy systems with few of the weaknesses. Thus far, high implementation complexity and infrastructure costs have prevented widespread adoption. Google Votes demonstrates how the use of social-networking technology can overcome these barriers and enable practical liquid democracy systems. The case-study of Google Votes usage at Google over a 3 year timeframe is included, as well as a framework for evaluating vote visibility called the Golden Rule of Liquid Democracy