On the Impact of Vote Delegation

Abstract

We examine vote delegation on blockchains where preferences of agents are private information. One group of agents (delegators) does not want to participate in voting and either abstains under conventional voting or can delegate its votes to a second group (voters) who decides 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 exert 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.