Strategic Proxy Voting on the Line

Abstract

This paper offers a framework for the study of strategic behavior in proxy voting, where non-active voters delegate their votes to active voters. We further study how proxy voting affects the strategic behavior of non-active voters and proxies (active voters) under complete and partial information. We focus on the median voting rule for single-peaked preferences. Our results show strategyproofness with respect to non-active voters. Furthermore, while strategyproofness does not extend to proxies, we show that the outcome is bounded and, under mild restrictions, strategic behavior leads to socially optimal outcomes. We further show that our results extend to partial information settings, and in particular for regret-averse agents.