Transitive Delegation in Social Networks : Theory and Experiment

Abstract. This paper develops a model of delegative democracy in which each voter can either vote directly or delegate her vote, together with the votes delegated to her, to another voter and analyzes the incentive for delegation and its impact on the quality of collective decision. A key finding is that as long as the delegation network is sufficiently ideologically homogeneous and large, voters are willing to delegate their votes even if they know neither who knows what nor who knows whom. I also show that delegation facilitates a better collective decision. The laboratory data confirm the theoretical predictions