  Liquid democracy is a system that combines aspects of direct democracy and
representative democracy by allowing voters to either vote directly themselves,
or delegate their votes to others. In this paper we study the information
aggregation properties of liquid democracy in a setting with heterogeneously
informed truth-seeking voters -- who want the election outcome to match an
underlying state of the world -- and partisan voters. We establish that liquid
democracy admits equilibria which improve welfare and information aggregation
over direct and representative democracy when voters' preferences and
information precisions are publicly or privately known. Liquid democracy also
admits equilibria which do worse than the other two systems. We discuss
features of efficient and inefficient equilibria and provide conditions under
which voters can more easily coordinate on the efficient equilibria in liquid
democracy than the other two systems.

Theoretical Economics