Preserving Consistency for Liquid Knapsack Voting

Pallavi Jain (Indian Institute of Technology Jodhupar), Krzysztof Sornat (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Nimrod Talmon (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

Abstract

Liquid Democracy (LD) uses transitive delegations in voting. In its simplest form, it is used for binary decisions, however its promise holds also for more advanced voting settings. Here we consider LD in the context of Participatory Budgeting (PB), which is a direct democracy approach to budgeting, most usually done in municipal budgeting processes. In particular, we study Knapsack Voting, in which PB voters approve projects, such that the sum of costs of projects each voter approves must respect the budget limit. We observe possible inconsistencies, as the cost of voter-approved projects may go over the budget limit after resolving delegations. We offer ways to overcome them by studying the computational complexity of updating as few delegations as possible to arriveafter following all project delegations-to a consistent profile.