Related papers: A Participatory Democratic Budgeting Algorithm
This paper focuses on managing the cost of deliberation before action. In many problems, the overall quality of the solution reflects costs incurred and resources consumed in deliberation as well as the cost and benefit of execution, when…
Direct democracy is a special case of an ensemble of classifiers, where every person (classifier) votes on every issue. This fails when the average voter competence (classifier accuracy) falls below 50%, which can happen in noisy settings…
Computational social choice and algorithmic decision theory offer rich aggregation theory but no comprehensive process for egalitarian self-governance: aggregation, deliberation, amendment, and consensus are each considered in isolation,…
We study voting rules for participatory budgeting, where a group of voters collectively decides which projects should be funded using a common budget. We allow the projects to have arbitrary costs, and the voters to have arbitrary additive…
In large scale collective decision making, social choice is a normative study of how one ought to design a protocol for reaching consensus. However, in instances where the underlying decision space is too large or complex for ordinal…
We consider a participatory budgeting problem in which each voter submits a proposal for how to divide a single divisible resource (such as money or time) among several possible alternatives (such as public projects or activities) and these…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process for allocating funds to projects based on the votes of members of the community. Different rules have been used to aggregate participants' votes. Past research has studied the trade-off…
We present a unifying framework encompassing many social choice settings. Viewing each social choice setting as voting in a suitable metric space, we consider a general model of social choice over metric spaces, in which---similarly to the…
Many societal decision problems lie in high-dimensional continuous spaces not amenable to the voting techniques common for their discrete or single-dimensional counterparts. These problems are typically discretized before running an…
We present an anytime algorithm which computes policies for decision problems represented as multi-stage influence diagrams. Our algorithm constructs policies incrementally, starting from a policy which makes no use of the available…
We study ways of evaluating the performance of losing projects in participatory budgeting (PB) elections by seeking actions that would have led to their victory. We focus on lowering the projects' costs, obtaining additional approvals for…
We address the question of aggregating the preferences of voters in the context of participatory budgeting. We scrutinize the voting method currently used in practice, underline its drawbacks, and introduce a novel scheme tailored to this…
Public confidence in democratic institutions has declined across many OECD countries over recent decades, while political participation and policy influence remain unevenly distributed across socioeconomic groups. Concurrently, democratic…
We initiate the study of voting rules for participatory budgeting using the so-called epistemic approach, where one interprets votes as noisy reflections of some ground truth regarding the objectively best set of projects to fund. Using…
The traditional axiomatic approach to voting is motivated by the problem of reconciling differences in subjective preferences. In contrast, a dominant line of work in the theory of voting over the past 15 years has considered a different…
Which level of voting costs is optimal in a democracy? This paper argues that intermediate voting costs - what we term a "Midcost democracy" - should be avoided, as they fail to ensure that electoral outcomes reflect the preferences of the…
The aim of this paper is to introduce models and algorithms for the Participatory Budgeting problem when projects can interact with each other. In this problem, the objective is to select a set of projects that fits in a given budget.…
In participatory budgeting (PB), voters decide through voting which subset of projects to fund within a given budget. Proportionality in the context of PB is crucial to ensure equal treatment of all groups of voters. However, pure…
Winner selection by majority, in an election between two candidates, is the only rule compatible with democratic principles. Instead, when the candidates are three or more and the voters rank candidates in order of preference, there are no…
Platforms for online civic participation rely heavily on methods for condensing thousands of comments into a relevant handful, based on whether participants agree or disagree with them. These methods should guarantee fair representation of…