Study of Nash Equilibria in Blockchain Voting Systems / Alon Benhaim.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Benhaim, Alon, author.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. Mathematics, degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mathematics.

Mathematics--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--Mathematics.

Local Subjects:

Mathematics.

Mathematics--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--Mathematics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (105 pages)

Distribution:

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2022

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 84-01B.

Place of Publication:

[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] : University of Pennsylvania, 2022.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In the first part of this thesis we analyze the three most common blockchain committees selection strategies: lottery, single-vote and approval voting, where voters can "approve" of any number of candidates. We first show that all these mechanisms converge to optimality exponentially quickly as the size of the committee grows. Approval-voting requires that even honest voters act strategically, we characterize different approval voting strategies and we show that although finding the optimal approval voting strategy is extremely complex, almost any approval voting strategy outperforms the single-vote mechanism enforced on the majority of blockchains. In the second part, we investigate a blockchain governance model where a group of n voters must choose between two collective alternatives. As opposed to the usual voting system (one person - one vote), we propose a voting system where each agent buys votes in favor of their preferred alternative, paying the m-th root of the number of votes purchased. Its novelty relies on allowing voters to express the intensity of their preferences in a simple manner. We provide a rigorous comparison of the utilitarian welfare between Regular Voting (m = 1) and Quadratic Voting (m = 2). We present closed formequilibrium solutions to the 2 voters and 3 voters games. In addition to characterizing the nature of equilibria, one of our main result demonstrates that the normalized utilitarian welfare of the mechanisms tends to one as the population size becomes large.

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-01, Section: B.

Advisors: Falk, Brett; Committee members: Tsoukalas, Gerry; Harbater, David; Haglund, James.

Department: Mathematics.

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2022.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9798837503078

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.